Situated in the tony Boston suburbs popular with high-tech firms, the operation might be any startup. Wide-eyed engineers tap feverishly on keyboards, while around them the facilities are still being built. It would be business as usual in the world of startups, except for the name on the front door: Mitsubishi Electric.

It's an experiment in entrepreneurship American-style-the first for the giant Japanese corporation. Mitsubishi has taken a technology developed at its research lab in Cambridge, Mass., and is attempting to build it into a business, Real Time Visualization. Though wholly owned by Mitsubishi, the outfit runs like a venture-backed startup. This summer the fledgling company made a big splash with the introduction of a computer-graphics first: a product that constructs 3-dimensional images in real time (30 frames per second) using a single custom-designed chip. It uses a type of 3-D graphics, called volume rendering, that has until now been possible only with software running on a powerful workstation or a supercomputer costing tens of thousands of dollars. Real Time Visualization puts its special-purpose chip on a standard PC board that computer system makers can buy for $3,000 to $5,000.