Transmeta will add a new antivirus technology standard to its next round of low-power chips, the company said Monday

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based concern said it has agreed to work with Microsoft (Quote, Chart) on the software giant's "No Execute" (commonly known as "NX") technology, a security feature that is a combination of hardware and Microsoft's Execution Protection software. The companies said the combination reduces memory buffer overruns that many hackers exploit to insert malicious code into Windows such as the MS Blaster, Code Red, and recent Sasser worms. Microsoft has been planning to ship the software support technologies as part of its forthcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and has worked with other chipmakers on support for the new security features. Intel said it would include NX in its Pentium 4 "Prescott" later this year. AMD (Quote, Chart) already has the technology as a part of its Athlon 64 and Opteron processors. Transmeta said its hardware is scheduled to ship with NX in mid-year 2004 with its new TM8000-series "Efficeon" processors. NX uses x86-based architecture CPUs to mark all memory locations in an application as non-executable unless the location explicitly contains executable code. This way, when an attacking worm or virus inserts program code into a portion of memory marked for data only, it cannot be run. While buffer overruns also plague Unix and Linux environments, Transmeta said it is working with Microsoft first. The company that used to employ Linux founder Linus Torvalds said for Linux to take advantage of NX would require a kernel upgrade.