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Frontier technologies leading advanced information society
Towards a Million TPI
Scott Abrahamson (Santa Clara University) and Fu-ying Huang (HGST)
Within the circles of HDD researchers and developers significant focus has been on the next generation recording technology, as well as the economic pressure on the viability of HDDs from flash or solid state storage technology. The market share of flash storage has been gradually increasing for years, both in very high performance applications and in mobile applications. Among the strongest factors for continued use of HDDs in all applications are cost in $/TB and energy density in W/cc. Developers and researchers in solid state storage are making improvements in these areas as well. Regardless of which next generation HDD recording technology you consider (HAMR, MAMR, or BPM), the increase in areal density will come largely from the ability to provide higher radial density than linear density. In other words, the TPI will increase more significantly that the BPI and the servomechanical design will have to improve dramatically to support these new recording technologies. This talk will show how the traditional evolutionary approaches of internal disturbance reduction and controller enhancement will fall short when it comes to meeting the 1 MTPI challenge. This is largely due to the effects of external disturbances, which do not scale with track pitch. To reach the objective, we will need not only evolutionary changes, but we will increasingly rely on other active elements such as sensors and controller stages to enhance the effective bandwidth of the control system. Additional sensors (or better use of current sensors) require improvements in signal to noise, or correlation between sensor signals and offtrack motion in order to cancel the effects of external disturbances. Because the market is sensitive not only to the cost per TB but also to the cost per HDD, and new recording technologies are expected to add to HDD cost, the use of more and/or more complex sensors carries an economic risk unless they can be added without increasing the overall HDD cost. As always with HDDs, the fundamental challenge of improving performance within the current range of production cost remains. The assistance of HGST in the preparation of this talk is gratefully acknowledged
Recent Advances of Nanomaterials for Printed Electronics
K. Suganuma, M. Nogi, J. Jiu, H. Koga, T. Sugahara and S. Nagao (Osaka University)
Printed electronics has been emerged as one of the key manufacturing processes for a wide variety of electronics products not only for home appliances but also for vehicles and for business-scale. The advances of nanomaterials, especially metallic and organic conductive materials, for printed electronics brought printed electronics into the reality. Sensing components by using metallic nanowires enable us to replace the conventional ITO transparent electrode to affordable, flexible, bendable, and even stretchable touch sensors. Wearable devices are another hot topic of printed electronics in the field of sports and fitness to healthcare. For wearable devices, not only wiring with metallic/organic materials, sensing, wireless transmission, and energy harvesting components must be equipped into a thin and flexible substrate with a suitable barrier structure. In the presentation, the current status of various nanomaterials for printed electronics sill be summarized with an introduction of attractive products.
Obstacle Detection by Stereo Vision for Collision Avoidance
Keiji Saneyoshi (Tokyo Institute of Technology)
Recently Automatic Emergency Braking System has been put on the market by many companies to avoid collisions in a traffic environment. Intelligent sensors that not only detects the distances to obstacles, but acquires other relevant information, such as the areas occupied by the obstacles, the location of the traffic lanes, and the position and motion of other cars and pedestrians should be used for the system. Stereo vision is suitable for this application because of its wide field of vision, simultaneous detection of multiple objects, and ability to measure their sizes, positions, and relative velocities, as well as its ability to detect road shape and lane markings. Nevertheless, stereo vision also has several weak points such as the enormous amount of computation, the problem of mismatching and its vulnerability to the weather. We have overcome these problems through the use of several techniques: a new hardware system, precise rectification and proper exposure control. Our stereo vision system was first presented at the Tokyo Motor Show in 1991. At that time, the performance was 10 fps with a resolution area of 512 x 200 pixels and depth of 100 pixels. In 1999, the first on board stereo vision system for collision avoidance was put on the market. Recently, we developed a new stereo vision system that can detect pedestrian running out into the road immediately. In this talk, I will present obstacle detection technique using stereo vision system and their applications by demonstrations and videos.
Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Measurement Technique of Brain Activity and Its Application to Human-Machine Interfaces
Keiichi Watanuki (Saitama University)
Comfortableness of a ride is an important issue to improve the passenger experience in an automobile. It is affected by a variety of factors such as vibration, noise, and interior space. In particular, vibration comfortableness of a ride, attributed to the vibration of a running car, is one of the factors that affect the comfort of an automobile. Therefore, the level of vibration of a running car should be reduced as much as possible to improve comfortableness of a ride. However, it is difficult to quantify comfortableness of a ride because it is significantly affected by not only the performance of the car but also by passengers' emotions and physiology. Since the evaluation of ride comfort depends on a developer's subjective evaluation using his/her emotion evaluation, it is necessary to carry out sensory evaluations repeatedly to improve comfortableness of a ride. For more efficient development, objective evaluation methods of human emotion are needed to quantitatively evaluate comfortableness of a ride based on interaction science. In recent years, the spread of noninvasive brain function measurement devices such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has allowed the measurement of brain activity during thinking or acting. NIRS is advantageous for its portability and fewer constraints on subjects. It allows measurement of a subject's brain functions while the subject is moving. This presentation provides an interaction science and noninvasive brain function measurement using NIRS to examine brain activity during vibration. In the presentation, the comfort level is evaluated using the sensory evaluation as the subjective evaluation of vibration, and the brain activities are evaluated using NIRS for objective evaluation. Based on the analysis of brain-activity during the sensation of vibration, the relationship between vibrations, comfortableness of a ride and brain activity will be considered.