eMuCo  with EU FP7 support of €2.9M, was successfully carried out by the consortium and coordinated by Ruhr-University Bochum.

Multi core has already happened in PCs bringing more performance with less power through parallelisation, virtualisation isolates software from the underlying hardware, so that there is no direct access and control from the soft to the hard.

“Today's smartphone users want to download applications and individually customise their phones according to their needs and preferences” said Attila Bilgic (right) eMuCo project coordinator. “ The need to download applications and keep protection of personal data and basic system against viruses and malicious code can be prevented through virtualization.”

As one of the outputs of the project, the eMuCo software platform which enables efficient usage of multi-cores on mobile embedded computing devices by using virtualisation techniques has been released as open source on June 8th 2010.

The platform is based on a small operating system kernel accompanied with various operating system components allowing manifold usage scenarios.

“The system opens access to latest embedded multi-core architectures offering efficient programming and processing of a broad range of different applications, ranging from special purpose applications such as protocol implementation to whole virtualised commodity operating systems” says Adam Lackorzynski (left) operating system architect.

The spectrum of applications for mobile phones will be broader with the higher processing capacity brought by multi-core and the system flexibility brought by virtualization.

“Multi-core & virtualisation solution enables higher processing capacity keeping the power consumption with the added-value of security and flexibility to bring services and applications fast to market making possible a new generation of smartphones” says co-coordinator of eMuCo project, Maria  Elizabeth Gonzalez (right),

“It is expected that the emerging multi-core & virtualization technology will revolutionize how a mobile phone is perceived and will opens new business models in the telecommunication market.”

The openness of the eMuCo software as well as its security, offers a platform for a manifold of new applications. Many companies could create applications and get paid by the end user. This creates a new market,  the first steps towards which have been taken by the iPhone and Google's  Android OS.