Renesas says it has joined the Symbian Foundation to "proactively participate within the open source ecosystem and to drive innovation centred on the combination of Renesas' next-generation multi-core CPU technology and cutting-edge multimedia and graphics capabilities provided by the Symbian platform". These multi-core chipsets will take advantage of Symbian's forthcoming support for SMP (symmetric multi-processing), which will be consumer ready in Symbian^4 and Symbian^5 (initial test components in Symbian^3).
Renesas also intends to contribute work to the continuing development of the Symbian Hardware Abstraction Interface layer(SHAI). The SHAI "defines a new, consistent hardware interface at the bottom of the Symbian platform software stack that is in many areas closer to the hardware, leading to growth of the core platform and a thinner (and easier to create/maintain) adaptation layer". SHAI will maker it cheaper and quicker to build and integrate devices based on the Symbian platform. You can read more about it at the Symbian Developer Wiki and the Working Group set up to help its adoption.
Renesas’ full press release can be found online, here's a brief extract:
"Symbian is thrilled to welcome Renesas Electronics Corporation as a member of the Symbian community,” said Larry Berkin, Head of Global Alliances at Symbian. “We value greatly Renesas’ vast industry and technology expertise as a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions and are certain that their active contribution, not only to the platform but also to the community, will further enrich the Symbian user experience of the future with fantastic multimedia and graphics capabilities."
"Calling on years of experience in providing mobile chipset platforms for NTT DOCOMO’s FOMA MOAP(S) Symbian-based smartphones, Renesas is well placed to work with Symbian to enable a compelling multimedia-focused user experience on new mobile devices to come,” said Hideaki Chaki, Senior Vice President and Vice President of 2nd SoC Business Unit of Renesas Electronics Corporation. “We believe that Symbian’s global reach will allow us to further expand our mobile platform business into the smartphone market outside Japan."