NEC Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and Matsushita Communication Industrial Co. said Thursday that they will market new third-generation mobile handsets with jointly developed technology in the second half of this year.

In a joint development that started in August, the three companies have designed the core architecture for a 3G mobile handset platform, they said.

The architecture features two central processing units, which will enable 3G mobile handsets to transact a large volume of data more quickly than comparable models with a single CPU, an NEC official said.

As part of efforts to speed up product development, the three recently set up the 3G Mobile Collaboration Office, a joint development base in Yokohama with about 50 workers. The number of the employees will rise to 100 by the end of October.

The three companies plan to provide licenses for using the architecture to other companies.

A Matsushita Communication official said licensing the architecture will help other companies reduce time and costs to develop 3G mobile handsets.

Currently, subscription of 3G mobile phone services, which can transmit large-volume data such as videos and music at a high speed, are available in major cities in the Kanto, Tokai and Kansai regions, provided under the name of FOMA by NTT DoCoMo Inc.

The spread of the service is expected to accelerate as NTT DoCoMo starts offering it to other regions in April and as other carriers try to promote similar services.

J-Phone Co. has also recently announced it will launch its third-generation mobile phone service June 30.

However, it seems it will take a long time to make 3G mobile phone services mainstream in Europe and in the United States, where subscribers are still on second-generation mobile phones which carry voice and still pictures.