持続可能で安心・安全な社会の実現に向けて、センシングアナリティクス、エッジAI/半導体、CMOSアニーリングなど現実世界から価値データを創生し、新たな価値を社会へ還元する、革新的計測・デジタル処理技術の研究開発を推進します。
センシング情報処理、エッジシステム、エッジAI、AI半導体、CMOSアニーリング
Publishing Academic Papers:
Shinya Kajiyama, Yutaka Igarashi, Toru Yazaki, Yusaku Katsube, Takuma Nishimoto, Tatsuo Nakagawa, Yohei Nakamura, Yoshihiro Hayashi, Takuya Kaneko, Hiroki Ishikuro, and Taizo Yamawaki, “T/R Switch Composed of Three HV-MOSFETs With 12.1-μW Consumption That Enables Per-Channel Self-Loopback AC Tests and -18.1-dB Switching Noise Suppression for 3-D Ultrasound Imaging With 3072-Ch Transceiver,” IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. TBD, Feb. 2022.
Abstract: This article presents an area- and power-efficient transmission/receiving (TX/RX)-isolation switch implemented in a 3072-ch ultrasound (US) in-probe 2-D array transceiver application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for real-time 3-D imaging. Conventional T/R switches that protect low voltage (LV) receivers from high voltage (HV) bipolar pulses require at least four HV-MOSFETs. The proposed dynamic gate-source shunt topology, which utilizes a negative-HV-transmit-driven shunt switch, eliminates area- and power-hungry HV-level shifters and ensures the OFF state of our T/R switch for HV/LV isolation during TX periods. In addition, source-driven HV-PMOS for ON/ control enables both gate charging and discharging using a single HV-PMOS. Thus, our T/R switch enables implementation with only three HV-MOSFETs for the first time in the world. The HV-level-shifter-less architecture also enables static-power-free operation in TX periods and consumption of only 12.1 μW in RX periods. Further, sequential input impedance control suppresses switching noise, which causes unwanted sound transmitted during TX to RX switching, by -18.1 dB. Moreover, by preparing an attenuation mode, a per-channel TX to RX self-loopback test can be performed. This function provides an on-wafer ac test without probing 3072 electrodes and it can be applied to the field diagnosis of assembled US probes.
Y. Nakamura, S. Kajiyama, Y. Igarashi, T. Oshima, and T. Yamawaki, “A low-power current-reuse LNA for 3D ultrasound beamformers,” IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences, vol. 104, no. 2, pp. 492–498, Feb. 2021.
Abstract: 3D ultrasound imagers require low-noise amplifier (LNA) with much lower power consumption and smaller chip area than conventional 2D imagers because of the huge amount of transducer channels. This paper presents a low-power small-size LNA with a novel current-reuse circuitry for 3D ultrasound imaging systems. The proposed LNA is composed of a differential common source amplifier and a source-follower driver which share the current without using inductors. The LNA was fabricated in a 0.18-μm CMOS process with only 0.0056mm2. The measured results show a gain of 21dB and a bandwidth of 9MHz. The proposed LNA achieves an average noise density of 11.3nV/√Hz, and the 2nd harmonic distortion below -40dBc with 0.1-Vpp input. The supply current is 85μA with a 1.8-V power supply, which is competitive with conventional LNAs by finer CMOS process.
Viviana Crescitelli, Atsutake Kosuge, Takashi Oshima
POISON: Human Pose Estimation in Insufficient Lighting Conditions Using Sensor Fusion
IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement (IF4.016), Pub Date : 2020-12-10,
Abstract: In this article, we present POISON, an end-to-end deep neural network (DNN) method to estimate the human pose in real-time and under the variability of lighting conditions. A lightweight version of the open-source library, OpenPose, is used to extract human keypoints from RGB and infrared (IR) images, and the contribution of each image is combined by a fusion step. We propose a method to fuse these two types of information, using a fusion strategy followed by a refinement stage DNN, which aims to identify complex relationships between extracted keypoints. Finally, the combined information is used to infer the human pose. The experimental results validate that POISON improves the overall performance of conventional single-camera methods by a factor $1.79\times $ . On a custom data set of RGB/IR pair images captured in challenging low-light conditions, POISON correctly detects up to 86% of human keypoints, outperforming conventional single-camera methods, which can detect up to 48% of keypoints. We also provide a comparison of POISON against the current state-of-the-art image fusion methods based on DNN techniques. We perform extensive quantitative evaluation and show that POISON outperforms existing approaches for the task of estimating the human pose in challenging lighting environments. POISON runs at 17 frames/s on Intel Core i7 CPU with Nvidia GeForce GTX-1080 GPU dedicated to DNN operations, making the solution suitable for real-time performance.
疑似量子コンピュータ「CMOSアニーリング」のクラウドサービス提供開始
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/month/2022/10/1003b.html
研究の現場から CMOSアニーリングにより金融取引の最適化に挑戦、リアルタイム処理が社会課題解決のキーとなる
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/rd/sc/story/cmos-annealing/index.html
実装体積を抑えながら大規模な組合せ最適化問題を解くCMOSアニーリング技術を開発
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/month/2021/02/0218b.html
数十人、数百人規模の最適な勤務シフトを作成するソリューションを提供開始
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/month/2020/10/1019a.html
「3密」回避の複雑なシフト作成を可能に 日立の最新テクノロジー「CMOSアニーリング」
https://social-innovation.hitachi/ja-jp/case_studies/covid19-cmos-annealing/
半導体ベースの新型コンピュータを活用した損害保険ポートフォリオ最適化に関する実証実験を開始
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/month/2020/01/0108.html
漏水検知サービス
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/Prod/comp/app/social_infra_mnt/water/index.html
独自開発の超高感度振動センサーとアルゴリズムにより、漏水の早期発見・補修をサポート 熊本市の導入事例
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/Prod/comp/app/social_infra_mnt/casestudy/kumamotoCity/casestudy1.html
福岡市の「インフラテック実証プロジェクト」において、独自の超高感度振動センサーを活用した水道管漏水検知に関する実証に参画
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/month/2021/07/0701a.html
「超高感度振動センサー(MEMS)を用いた漏水検知システムの開発」が日刊工業新聞社主催の「第51回 日本産業技術大賞 文部科学大臣賞」を受賞
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/information/info/20220413.html
漏水特有の微小振動を検知する超高感度振動センサーと漏水検知アルゴリズムをサービス化して社会課題を解決する。
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/rd/sc/story/leakage/index.html
水道管の漏水を遠隔監視する漏水検知サービスにおいてセンサーの最適な設置位置を自動で決定する技術を開発
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/rd/news/topics/2023/2306_wtr.html
地中可視化サービス：社会インフラ保守プラットフォーム
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/Prod/comp/app/social_infra_mnt/subsurface/
「地中可視化サービス」を強化し、オンデマンドで高精度な埋設物位置情報を提供
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/month/2021/12/1208.html
仙台市と、下水道管路施設の設計・施工業務の効率化に向け、レーダーやAI解析などデジタル技術を用いた共同研究を開始
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/month/2022/07/0721.html
ピッキング用ロボットの活用促進に向けて、新規物品登録を容易にするAI学習技術を開発
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/rd/news/topics/2021/0414.html
