Question: which family of microcontrollers was NanoVM developed to run on 

Context articles: H8 Family
Intel MCS-96
Atmel AVR
Infineon XMC
Hercules (processors)
NanoVM
Atmel AVR ATtiny comparison chart
Intel 4004
Mikroelektronika
I.MX

H8 is the name of a large family of 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers made by Renesas Technology, originating in the early 1990s within Hitachi Semiconductor and still evolving as of 2006.
 The family of largely CISC machines is unrelated to the higher-performance SuperH family of 32-bit RISC-like microcontrollers.
The Intel MCS-96 is a family of microcontrollers (MCU) commonly used in embedded systems.
 The family is often referred to as the 8xC196 family, or 80196, the most popular MCU in the family.
 These MCUs are commonly used in hard disk drives, modems, printers, pattern recognition and motor control.
 In 2007, Intel announced the discontinuance of the entire MCS-96 family of microcontrollers.
 Intel noted that "There are no direct replacements for these components and a redesign will most likely be necessary."
AVR is a family of microcontrollers developed by Atmel beginning in 1996.
 These are modified Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC single-chip microcontrollers.
 AVR was one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other microcontrollers at the time.
XMC is a family of microcontroller ICs by Infineon.
 The XMC microcontrollers use the 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores from ARM Holdings, such as Cortex-M4F and Cortex-M0.
 XMC stands for "cross-market microcontrollers", meaning that this family can cover due to compatibility and configuration options, a wide range in industrial applications.
 The family supports three essential trends in the industry: It increases the energy efficiency of the systems, supports a variety of communication standards and reduces software complexity in the development of the application's software environment with the parallel released eclipse-based software tool DAVE.
Hercules is a line of ARM architecture-based microcontrollers from Texas Instruments built around one or more ARM Cortex cores.
 This "Hercules safety microcontroller platform" includes series microcontrollers specifically targeted for Functional Safety applications, through such hardware-base fault correction/detection features as dual cores that can run in lock-step, full path ECC, automated self testing of memory and logic, peripheral redundancy, and monitor/checker cores.
NanoVM is an open-source implementation of the Java virtual machine.
 The NanoVM was initially developed to run on the Atmel AVR ATmega8 used in the Asuro Robot.
 It was ported to run on the C't-Bot and the Nibo-robot and can easily be ported to other AVR-based systems.
Atmel is a manufacturer of semiconductors, founded in 1984.
 One of its main products is microcontrollers.
 The smallest in their AVR family of microcontrollers are the ATtiny series (8-bit core and fewer features, fewer I/O pins, and less memory than other AVR series).
The Intel 4004 is a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU) released by Intel Corporation in 1971.
 It was the first commercially available microprocessor by Intel.
 The chip design started in April 1970, when Federico Faggin joined Intel, and it was completed under his leadership in January 1971.
 The first commercial sale of the fully operational 4004 occurred in March 1971 to Busicom Corp. of Japan for which it was originally designed and built as a custom chip.
 In mid-November of the same year, with the prophetic ad ""Announcing a new era in integrated electronics"", the 4004 was made commercially available to the general market.
 The 4004 is history’s first monolithic CPU, fully integrated in one small chip.
 Such a feat of integration was made possible by the use of the then-new silicon gate technology for integrated circuits, originally developed by Federico Faggin (with Tom Klein) at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968, which allowed twice the number of random-logic transistors and an increase in speed by a factor of five compared to the incumbent MOS aluminum gate technology .
 Faggin also invented the bootstrap load with silicon gate and the “buried contact”, improving speed and circuit density compared with aluminum gate .
 The 4004 microprocessor is one of 4 chips constituting the MCS-4 chip-set, which includes the 4001 ROM, 4002 RAM, and 4003 Shift Register.
 With these components, small computers with varying amounts of memory and I/O facilities can be built.
 Three other CPU chip designs were done at about the same time: the Four-Phase System AL1, done in 1969; the MP944, completed in 1970 and used in the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet; and the Texas Instruments TMS-0100 chip, announced in September 17, 1971.
 Both the AL1 and the MP944 use several chips for the implementation of the CPU function.
 The TMS0100 chip was presented as a “calculator on a chip” with the original designation TMS1802NC.
 This chip contains a very primitive CPU and can only be used to implement various simple 4-function calculators.
 It is the precursor of the TMS1000, introduced in 1974, which is considered the first microcontroller i.e., a computer on a chip containing not only the CPU, but also ROM, RAM, and I/O functions.
 The MCS-4 family of 4 chips developed by Intel, of which the 4004 is the CPU or microprocessor, is far more versatile and powerful than the single chip TMS1000, allowing the creation of a variety of small computers for various applications.
 The MCS-4 was eventually superseded by powerful microcontrollers like the Intel 8048 and the Zilog Z8 in 1978-1979.
 Zilog, the first company entirely dedicated to microprocessors and microcontrollers, was started by F. Faggin and Ralph Ungermann, at the end of 1974.
 These devices formed the basis for later models of micro-controllers.
MikroElektronika (sometimes known by its abbreviation MikroE) is a producer and retailer of hardware and software tools for developing embedded systems.
 The company headquarters are in Belgrade, Serbia.
 Its best known software products are mikroC, mikroBasic and mikroPascal compilers for programming microcontrollers. Its flagship hardware product line is click boards™, a range of more than 250 add-on boards for interfacing microcontrollers with peripheral sensors or transceivers.
 These boards conform to mikroBUS™ – a standard conceived by MikroElektronika and later endorsed by NXP Semiconductors and Microchip Technology, among others.
 MikroElektronika is also known for Hexiwear, an Internet of Things development kit developed in partnership with NXP Semiconductors.
The i.MX range is a family of Freescale Semiconductor (now part of NXP) proprietary microcontrollers for multimedia applications based on the ARM architecture and focused on low-power consumption.
 The i.MX application processors are SoCs (System-on-Chip), that integrate many processing units into one die, like the main CPU, a video processing unit and a graphics processing unit for instance.
 The i.MX products are qualified for automotive, industrial and consumer markets.
 Most of them are guaranteed for a production lifetime of 10 to 15 years.Many devices use i.MX processors, such as Ford Sync, Kobo_eReader, Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Onyx Boox readers/tablets, SolidRun SOM's (including CuBox), some Logitech Harmony remote controls and Squeezebox radio, some Toshiba Gigabeat mp4 players.
 The i.MX range was previously known as the "DragonBall MX" family, the fifth generation of DragonBall microcontrollers.
 i.MX originally stood for "innovative Multimedia eXtension".