Masanori Muroyama

Tohoku Institute of Technology · Faculty of Engineering

We have developed tactile sensor systems for next‐generation robots. To install a large number of tactile sensors, we have proposed micro electro mechanical systems‐large‐scale integration (MEMS‐LSI) integrated tactile sensors. The integrated device has the following features: capacitive type three‐axis force sensing, embedded diode‐based temperatu...

We have developed tactile sensor systems for next-generation robots. To install a large number of tactile sensors, we have proposed MEMS-LSI integrated tactile sensors. The integrated device has following features: capacitive type 3-axis force sensing, embedded diode-based temperature sensing, signal processing for sensing data digitalization, and...

This study aimed to understand the magnetic behavior of amorphous Fe–Si–B thin films in the presence of residual stress. Residual stress appeared in the thin films during the sputtering process, which was controlled by changing the Ar flow rate during sputtering. Consequently, some thin films developed compressive stress and others developed tensil...

For biomedical applications, smart materials that are used as sensors or actuators have to match some criteria, especially bio-compatibility and softness. Smart polymers are candidates that fulfill these two criteria. A sensitivity to compression is created by adding magnetic particles to a compressible foam polymer. A foam-based composite is fabri...

By using the stress–impedance (SI) effect of a soft magnetic amorphous FeCuNbSiB alloy, a micromachined force sensor was fabricated and characterized. The alloy was used as a sputtered thin film of 500 nm thickness. To clarify the SI effect in the used material as a thin film, its magnetic and mechanical properties were first investigated. The stre...

This paper reports on moment detection by three integrated tactile sensors that detect 3‐axis forces. In this study, the three integrated tactile sensors were connected along a serial bus and were mounted in a triangle shape on a circuit board. Out‐of‐plane moment applied on the circuit board was measured using the shearing forces and a geometric r...

This paper reports on moment detection by three integrated tactile sensors that detect 3-axis forces. In this study, the three integrated tactile sensors were connected along a serial bus and were mounted in a triangle shape on a circuit board. Out-of-plane moment applied on the circuit board was measured using the shearing forces and a geometric r...

This paper describes an event-driven tactile sensing system including 100 CMOS-MEMS integrated 3-axis force sensors of 2.7 mm square footprint for providing robot tactile sensation. The system has the following features: (1) the event-driven function of the CMOS LSI integrated in the sensor can reduce the number of stimulated sensors, (2) the stimu...

This study proposes a sensing system that can sense force and temperature at the same time. The system consists of MEMS-LSI integrated tactile sensor devices called sensor nodes, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based relay node, and a host PC. For real-time temperature and force data acquisition, a time-sharing force and temperature task pro...

Assistant robots need a tactile sensing system. We propose a tactile sensor head with a nerve-net sensing system which measures force, temperature and heat flow on robot fingers. For accurate heat flow measurements, it is necessary to stabilize contact conditions between the sensor head and objects. A sensor stick which consists of the sensor head...

Next generation robots are expected to assist humans by means of tactile sensing technologies. Relationships between physically measured values of fabrics with a friction sense tester KES-SE-SR-U (KATO TECH, Japan) and human friction sensations were evaluated. MIU (average friction coefficient), MMD (average deviation of friction coefficient) and S...

Assistant robots need a tactile sensing system. We propose a tactile sensor head with a nerve-net sensing system which measures force, temperature and heat flow with a heater simultaneously on a robot finger. For accurate heat flow measurements, it is necessary to stabilize the contact conditions between the sensor head and an object. A sensor stic...

Covering a whole surface of a robot with tiny sensors which can measure local pressure and transmit the data through a network is an ideal solution to give an artificial skin to robots to improve a capability of action and safety. The crucial technological barrier is to package force sensor and communication function in a small volume. In this pape...

This paper reports a MEMS-on-LSI integrated tactile sensor for robot applications that has both fully differential capacitive 3-axis force sensing and signal processing in a single chip. The MEMS part is composed of a quad-seesaw-electrode structure that senses 3-axis force with fully differential capacitive detection. The LSI part is an original s...

For installing many sensors in a limited space with a limited computing resource, the digitization of the sensor output at the site of sensation has advantages such as a small amount of wiring, low signal interference and high scalability. For this purpose, we have developed a dedicated Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) Large-Scale Int...

This paper reports a 3-axis fully integrated differential capacitive tactile sensor surface-mountable on a bus line. The sensor integrates a flip-bonded complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) with capacitive sensing circuits on a low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) interposer with Au through vias by Au-Au thermo-compression bonding. The...

This paper reports a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) tactile sensor with a quad-seesaw-electrode (QSE) structure, which allows integration with a CMOS substrate. The QSE structure enables fully-differential detection and 3-axis force detection by utilizing the difference of the working mode of the four seesaw electrodes. In this study, we des...

Robot tactile sensation can enhance human–robot communication in terms of safety, reliability and accuracy. The final goal of our project is to widely cover a robot body with a large number of tactile sensors, which has significant advantages such as accurate object recognition, high sensitivity and high redundancy. In this study, we developed a mu...

Tactile sensing is required for assistant robots. A new stacked sensor head was proposed which detects forces and thermal sensations with a nerve-net LSI chip. To measure temperatures and heat flows, the sensor head required a thin and small heater to heat up the sensor head. The features of the polyimide heater are compact, low heat capacity, low...

The 17× 17 parallel electron beam lithography system has been implemented and evaluated to clarify its system problems and to accelerate a 100× 100 massive parallel electron beam direct draw system under development. This paper describes its system concept, an electron emitter driver circuit, its control system and an exposure result.

Developments of a Micro Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) electrostatic Condenser Lens Array (CLA) for a Massively Parallel Electron Beam Direct Write (MPEBDW) lithography system are described. The CLA converges parallel electron beams for fine patterning. The structure of the CLA was designed on a basis of analysis by a finite element method (FEM)...

This paper describes a MEMS-CMOS integrated tactile sensor for surface mounting on a flexible and stretchable bus line. The sensor is featured by the following configurations; 1) A sensing diaphragm is formed on a CMOS substrate by backside etching, and 2) the CMOS substrate is flip-bonded to a special low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) substra...

This paper reports a 3-axis MEMS-CMOS integrated tactile sensor for surface-mounting on a flexible bus line. This 3-axis sensor uses a bran-new CMOS LSI with capacitive sensing circuit and other extended functionalities (e.g. configurability and a robust clock data recovery algorithm). The sensor is composed of a flip-bonded CMOS substrate with a s...

An LSI for the Massive Parallel Electron Beam Lithography using nc-Si (Nano Cristal Silicon) has been developed. It can drive a 100×100 electron emitter as an active matrix electron emitter with an innovative aberration correction scheme, a compensation scheme for electron beam intensity variation and a test circuit for testing LSI during integrati...

Making the best use of the characteristic features in nanocrystalline Si (nc-Si) ballistic hot electron source, the alternative lithographic technology is presented based on the two approaches: physical excitation in vacuum and chemical reduction in solutions. The nc-Si cold cathode is a kind of metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) diode, composed o...

This paper reviews our recent progress of application studies on planer-surface-type and Pierce-gun-type nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si) ballistic electron emitter arrays, which were designed and prototyped to be able to integrate with a separately fabricated active-matrix large scale integrated driving circuit for the realization of massively para...

The following novel configuration has been developed for a MEMS-CMOS integrated tactile sensor on a flexible and stretchable bus for covering a social robot body: 1) a sensing diaphragm is formed on a CMOS substrate by backside etching, and 2) the CMOS substrate is flip-bonded to a low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) substrate. By this configur...

We have developed a large-scale integrated (LSI) complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS)- based amperometric sensor array system called “Bio-LSI” as a platform for electrochemical bio-imaging and multi-point biosensing with 400 measurement points. In this study, we newly developed a Bio-LSI chip with a light-shield structure and a mode-selec...

We develop an advanced version of large-scale integration (LSI)-based amperometric sensing system with a 400-electrode array for real-time bioimaging and simultaneous multi-point biosensing (Bio-LSI). Two major improvements allow the Bio-LSI to be a widely applicable platform. The first improvement is the addition of a light-shielding structure mad...

The characteristics of a prototype massively parallel electron beam direct writing (MPEBDW) system are demonstrated. The electron optics consist of an emitter array, a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) condenser lens array, auxiliary lenses, a stigmator, three-stage deflectors to align and scan the parallel beams, and an objective lens acting...

This paper presents a novel SOI capacitive tactile sensor with a quad-seesaw electrode for 3-axis complete differential detection, which enables integration with a CMOS. For differentially detecting 3-axis forces, the tactile sensor is composed of four rotating plates individually suspended by torsion beams. In this study, to demonstrate the workin...

抄録 We have been developing a bus networked tactile sensor system using integrated devices with MEMS force sensors and signal processing LSIs (sensor nodes) to realize the whole body tactile sensation of humanoid robots. Although the MEMS-CMOS integration technology enables the MEMS sensor to have a digital serial communication function which can re...

A bus-connected tactile sensor system composed of MEMS-CMOS integrated force sensors was developed. A capacitance-to-digital convertor for force sensing, a data reduction processor and a serial bus communication controller are implemented by a laboratory-designed ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). These functions enable the tactile sen...

The CMOS-MEMS integrated tactile sensor enables the robot to have dense and large area tactile sensor on the whole body. The ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) with the CMOS technology provides the communication function for the bus connected tactile sensor. The size of integrated chips is reduced by wafer-level-packaging (WLP) technolo...

This study demonstrated our prototyped Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS) electron emitter which is a nc-Si (nanocrystalline silicon) ballistic electron emitter array integrated with an active-matrix driving LSI for high-speed Massively Parallel Electron Beam Direct Writing (MPEBDW) system. The MPEBDW system consists of the multi-column, and ea...

This paper describes a novel wafer-level integration and packaging technology for a chip-size-packaged integrated tactile sensor. A MEMS wafer and a CMOS wafer were bonded with a thick (50 μm thick) BCB (benzocyclobutene) adhesive layer, and a capacitance gap for capacitive force sensor is formed between the wafers. The large thickness of BCB is ad...

We have developed a tactile sensor network system, which consists of integrated MEMS-LSI tactile sensors (sensor nodes), relay nodes, a host and flexible bus power/interconnection lines for mounting a large amount of tactile sensor elements on the whole body of robots. Each sensor node, which is connected on the common bus lines, transmits sensing...

An ultra-small tactile sensor with functions of signal processing and digital communication has been prototyped based on MEMS-CMOS integration technology. The designed analog-digital mixed signal ASIC allows many tactile sensors to connect each other on a common bus line, which drastically reduces the number of wire. The ASIC capacitively detects t...

We have developed a network type tactile sensor system, which realizes high-density tactile sensors on the whole-body of nursing and communication robots. The system consists of three kinds of nodes: host, relay and sensor nodes. Roles of the sensor node are to sense forces and, to encode the sensing data and to transmit the encoded data on serial...

This paper describes a wafer bonding process using a 50 µm thick benzocyclobutene (BCB) layer which has vias and metal electrodes. The vias were fabricated by molding BCB using a glass mold. During the molding, worm-like voids grew between BCB and the mold due to the shrinkage of polymerizing BCB. They were completely removed by subsequent reflowin...

This paper describes a novel integration and packaging process for a chip-size-packaged integrated tactile sensor. A MEMS wafer and a CMOS wafer were bonded with a thick (50 μm thick) BCB (benzocyclobutene) layer, which also works as the dielectric layer of sensing electrodes. The large thickness is advantageous to reduce parasitic capacitance to t...

This paper proposes a novel tactile sensor system, which acquires sensing data by interrupt data transmission from each tactile sensor element. The interrupt makes decentralized sensing data transmission. Compared with existing centralized tactile sensor systems, the system can handle a large amount of tactile sensor elements and attach the element...

This paper describes analysis of on-chip bus power in the presence of arrival time variations of input signals. With shrinking process geometries, coupling power between neighboring bus lines has enlarged. The coupling power depends on not only signal transition type but also the relative signal transition time difference. For conventional dynamic...

This paper proposes an energy efficient processor which can be used as a design alternative for the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) processors in embedded system design. The processor consists of multiple PE (processing element) cores and a selective set-associative cache memory. The PE-cores have the same instruction set architecture but differ in t...

Workshop on Embedded Systems for Real-Time Multimedia (ESTIMedia2006) : 2006年10月26日～27日：Seoul, South Korea This paper proposes an energy characterization framework which helps designers in developing a fast and accurate energy model for a target processor-based system. We use a linear model for energy estimation and we find the coefficients of the...

This paper proposes a simulation-based soft error estimation methodology for computer systems. Accumulating soft error rates (SERs) of all memories in a computer system results in pessimistic soft error estimation. This is because memory cells are used spatially and temporally and not all soft errors in them make the computer system faulty. Our sof...

This paper proposes a low power software design technique for processor-based embedded systems. A basic idea is to reduce switching activities in sign extension bits of instruction operands through shifting the operands. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first software-level power reduction technique which exploits narrow bitwidth operation...

One of the biggest problems in complicated and high-performance SoC design is management of energy and/or power consumption. In this chapter, we present energy management techniques in system design including HW and SW, SoC architecture and logic design. Dynamic power consumption is the major factor of energy consumption in the current CMOS digital...

We propose a novel approach for designing a low power datapath in wireless communication systems. Especially, we focus on the digital FIR filter. Our proposed approach can reduce the power consumption and the circuit area of the digital FIR filter by optimizing the bitwidth of the each filter coefficient with keeping the filter calculation accuracy...

This paper describes a novel low-power coding methodology for buses. Ultra deep submicron technology and system-on-chip have resulted in a considerable portion of power consumption on buses, in which the major sources of the power consumption are the transition activities on the signal lines and the coupling capacitances of the lines. In addition,...

We propose a new design method for a low power equalization circuit using adaptive bitwidth control. It can reduce the amount of necessary calculation to control the bitwidth of the equalization circuit. We show that our new method is effective for a low power equalization circuit by experimental simulation while keeping the required calculation ac...

To transfer a small number, we inherently need a small number of bits. However all bit lines on a data bus change their status and redundant power is consumed. To reduce the redundant power consumption, we introduce a concept named active bit. In this paper, we propose a power reduction scheme for data buses using active bits. Suppressing switching...

In this paper, we propose a new technique for a low power equalization circuit using adaptive bitwidth control. It can reduce the amount of necessary calculation to control the bitwidth of the equalization circuit. In the compensation step, estimation in equalizing will be held in the less bitwidth when the error signals are big. On the other hand,...

World Automation Congress Fourth International Forum on Multimedia & Image Processing Jun. 2004 This paper addresses an energy optimization problem of pipeline depth and voltage scheduling for hard real-time tasks on a dynamic pipeline and voltage scaled (DPVS) processor, which can adjust its pipeline depth and operating voltage dynamically dependi...

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This paper presents a variable pipeline depth processor, which can dynamically adjust its pipeline depth and operating voltage at run-time, we call dynamic pipeline and voltage scaling (DPVS), depending on the workload characteristics under timing constraints. The advantage of adjusting pipeline depth is that it can eliminate the useless energy dis...

To transfer a small number, we inherently need the small number of bits. But all bit lines on a data bus change their status and redundant power is consumed. To reduce the redundant power consumption, we introduce a concept named active bits. In this paper, we propose a power reduction scheme for data buses using the active bits. Suppressing switch...

External buses consume substantial power for their high capacitances of bus lines and I/O pins. In this paper, we reduce redundant dynamic power consumption on instruction buses. For expressing a small number, we need the small number of bits (the minimum bits are defined as active bits). But all bit lines on an instruction bus change their status...

As a basic cell of arithmetic circuits, a one-bit full adder and a counter are usually used. Minimizing power consumption of these components is a key issue for low-power circuit design. This paper proposes a new design method, in which basic cells are selected from a set of circuits with different structures (symmetrical and asymmetrical) and conn...

This paper presents a new concept called active data bitwidth, which is the effective data length of data bus. By means of profiling the active data bitwidth dynamically, we present a novel low-energy memory access technique for on-chip data memory design. By reducing the redundant access energy of data memory, our experimental results of two real...

As a basic cell of arithmetic circuits, a one-bit full adder and a counter are usually used. Minimizing power consumption of these components is a key issue for low-power circuit design. This paper proposes a new design method, in which basic cells are selected from a set of circuits with different structures (symmetrical and asymmetrical) and conn...

As a basic cell of arithmetic circuits, a one-bit full adder and a counter are usually used. Minimizing power consumption of these components is a key issue for low-power circuit design. This paper proposes a new design method, in which basic cells are selected from a set of circuits with different structures (symmetrical and asymmetrical) and conn...

This paper presents a new concept called active data bitwidth, which is the effective data length of data bus. By means of profiling the active data bitwidth dynamically, we present a novel low-energy memory access technique for on-chip data memory design. By reducing the redundant access energy of data memory, our experimental results of two real...

Digital wireless communication systems are used in various devices and addressing to low power and low energy system implementation. We propose an energy reduction tech-nique for digital wireless communication systems considering the communication quality for each application. Our proposed technique is controlling the two mode, such as high quality...