Abstracts of Magazine FUJITSU 2007-5 (VOL.58, NO.3)

Special Issue: Research and Development

• Research and Development at Fujitsu Laboratories

Fujitsu Laboratories continue to advance R&D in meeting the challenges of a new era in line with its mission of being "the research laboratory in the 21st century." In order to create a future ubiquitous information society that is sensitive to the needs of people and gentle to the earth's environment, we have been developing technologies that will define the future by focusing our effort on materials, devices, networks, and computer systems. Fujitsu Laboratories also participate in a wide range of activities to realize safe and comfortable solutions for people. We must develop and expand our leading-edge technologies on a global basis. Toward that end, research bases established in the U.S., Europe, and China are working in collaboration. In terms of R&D management, individual laboratories share roadmaps for technology. This paper briefly introduces the R&D management and activities at Fujitsu Laboratories, with particular focus on the theme taken up by this special edition.

• Document Image Recognition for e-Documents and Internal Control

The e-document law enforced in 2005 allows electronic representations of paper documents containing color images to be used as forensic evidence. The so-called Japanese SOX law is expected to be enforced in 2008. This law will obligate companies to implement internal controls, centering on their financial information. Enterprises accumulate and circulate a large number of paper documents related to internal control, and there is an increasing need to digitize them so the information they contain can be located and reused in computer systems. We have therefore developed two document image recognition technologies for e-documents and internal control. The first is a color, descriptor-less recognition system for paper images. The second is a system for making full-text searches within color images on paper documents. We will soon release a product that incorporates the first technology, and the second technology is already incorporated in Fujitsu's ScanSnap scanner. This paper describes these two technologies.

• Watermarking Technologies for Security-Enhanced Printed Documents

Since April 2005, there have been numerous laws enforced in Japan to protect personal information. The responsibility for protecting personal information has become a critical issue for enterprise-level businesses. Leaks of sensitive information do not happen exclusively through computers and networks. In fact, many incidents involve printed documents. It is now possible to protect confidential and private information by applying the following countermeasures when printing documents: 1) copy control by applying a watermark to restrict copying and forgery and 2) watermarks for traceability, including background texture watermarks and font-embedded watermarks. This paper describes these countermeasures and several areas other than leakage control in which they can be applied.

• Ethno-Cognitive Interview Method for Work Practice Understanding

To build effective IT systems that improve a customer's work, it is important to understand the customer's work practices. To help us do this, we have developed an effective interview methodology for understanding a customer's work practices from the viewpoints of their workers. This methodology, called ECOW Interview, uses several types of worksheets that help us control the interview process and understand the interviewee's work from several viewpoints, for example, the time sequence, working space, and relations to co-workers. By interviewing several workers for typically 90 minutes each and observing the workers' office for about a day, we can obtain a good understanding of the customer's work practices and then extract and share the problems to be solved. In this paper, we introduce ECOW Interview and present some typical outputs from interviews. We also describe how ECOW Interview has been used at a financial retail office.

• Technologies for Improving Efficiency of Support Operation Management

This paper looks at Fujitsu Laboratories' research for technological development of support services such as hardware support and contact center operation, which both depend on human resources. Improving each agent's skill and properly assigning human resources for these services leads to efficient support operation. Support services store a large amount of electronic data about their activities, for example, their agents' questions and answers reports. We think that efficiency can be greatly improved by analyzing this data. This paper introduces analysis technologies, for example, a knowledge creation assist technology that automatically detects frequently occurring incidents, and an agent arrangement assist technology that simulates contact center activity to accurately estimate key performance indexes (KPIs).

• Environmental Burden Evaluation of ICT Solution Using FRAM

Recently, information and communication technology (ICT) solutions using IC tags and smart cards have been introduced in various fields, for example, in business, to improve work efficiency. We selected a ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM) and analyzed the environmental burden of its manufacture. In addition, we estimated how introducing two ICT solutions that use cards containing this FRAM - a visitor management system at an event hall and an electronic payment system at stores in a facility - affected the environmental burden using an environmental evaluation method developed by Fujitsu.
We found that introducing these ICT solutions increased the work efficiency and reduced paper consumption. We also found that, even when the CO₂ emissions generated by manufacturing the FRAM were taken into account, the total CO₂ emissions from the ICT solutions were less than those from the conventional systems.

• Application of Network Knowledge

The network world has become strongly connected with the real world. Fujitsu believes that by observing a network, not only the network's conditions but also conditions in the real world can be perceived. We are currently determining the social and business values of sensed information obtained from a network, which we call network knowledge. This paper introduces two examples of technologies that can convert a bit stream in a network to specific network knowledge. The first technology, network diagnosis, identifies the causes and locations of faults and predicts deteriorations in performance. The second technology, four-dimensional traffic engineering, optimizes resource allocation in consideration of future variations in traffic. These technologies are useful for building a robust and easy-to-use information service environment.

• Data Read/Write Technology for UHF Multiple RFID Tags

Passive RFID tags operating in the 860 to 960 MHz UHF band have a wider communication area than those operating in other frequency bands, which makes them particularly useful in supply chain management (SCM) applications. To extend the RFID market, accurate data communication with RFID tags is indispensable. We have therefore developed a read/write technology that improves the precision of reading and writing from and to multiple RFID tags. Using this technology, we have developed a data reading and writing system that can communicate with 100 tags moving at 1 m/s with a read/write success rate of 99.999% or more. The system uses a high write-performance FRAM RFID LSI made by Fujitsu and the protocol conforms to ISO/IEC 18000-6 Type B. This paper describes the read/write technology we developed.

• Video Compression Technology for In-vehicle Image Transmission: SmartCODEC

Next-generation vehicles will require many video channels for safer driving and more enjoyable traveling. Digital video data from, for example, cameras positioned around a vehicle, a navigation system, and a DVD, will be transmitted over an in-vehicle LAN. Data compression-decompression (CODEC) will be indispensable for multiplexing this data so the LAN bandwidth is used effectively. The compression technology for in-vehicle images must implement minimal delay and a high image quality at low cost. This paper describes the "SmartCODEC" technology, which has been specially developed to transmit image data in vehicles to achieve such requirements.

• Virtual Product Simulator

Industrial design and manufacturing processes are currently being restructured by the extensive use of information technologies. This is being done because of the pressing need to improve reliability, shorten development periods, and reduce development costs in all phases - from conceptual design to detailed design and manufacturing. Manufacturing industries are now progressively applying a new concept of simulator developed by Fujitsu called the Virtual Product Simulator (VPS). This simulator is the result of almost 10 years of fundamental research of simulation technologies at our laboratories. This paper describes the background of VPS's development and its state-of-the-art functions. It also describes some typical applications of VPS and its future development.

• TRIOLE Organic Computing Architecture

Autonomous mechanisms are expected to serve as foundations for stable, adaptable, and cost-efficient managed IT systems that can support social and economic activities. This paper describes an autonomous mechanism developed by Fujitsu called the TRIOLE organic computing architecture, which integrates human activities and IT processes. Next, it describes a unified description scheme that defines a series of management processes for integrating human activities and IT processes and outlines a method for easily creating reliable processes by using policies and templates. Lastly, it describes a configuration management database based on system knowledge about this architecture.

• Service Middleware for Performing and Optimizing On-site Work

The growing importance of services is placing a greater emphasis on company worksites. Although back-end enterprise systems are the foundations of business competitiveness, the large scale of these systems prevents them from keeping pace with changes in service needs, and the burden of satisfying these needs is left to worksite employees. Service middleware should be the core of IT for worksites and form the front-end of back-end enterprise systems. The execution layer of service middleware is used by worksite employees, and the optimization layer is used by worksite managers. The execution layer combines enterprise systems, worksite sensors, and apparatus; it helps the worksite employees with their tasks and can greatly increase their value. The optimization layer adjusts the execution layer to meet changes in the service needs and changes in enterprise systems. This paper describes a service middleware developed by Fujitsu for performing and optimizing on-site work.

• Grid Middleware for Realizing Autonomous Resource Sharing: Grid Service Platform

These days, many enterprises are interested in system consolidation to achieve efficient operation of their IT resources. Especially, grid techniques are attracting close attention because distributed systems can be used collectively as a single system. The changes in load that occur during business operations cause fluctuations in the required number of servers, and grid systems must flexibly allocate server resources to respond to these fluctuations. We have therefore co-developed with France Télécom (FT) a middleware called Grid Service Platform (GSP) for realizing autonomous resource sharing based on the priority of business operations. We implemented a batch service and a real-time online service and then evaluated GSP on a testbed consisting of sites from Japan and France. We confirmed that GSP enhanced the capacity of the online service by 30% or more and simultaneously reduced the execution time of the batch service by 12%.

• A 20-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switch LSI and Its Application

The next-generation Ethernet - the 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) - has a transmission speed of 10 gigabits per second. Because the performance of server systems and the amount of data to be processed are increasing, 10GbE is attracting attention as a technology for connecting IT resources such as servers and storage at reasonable cost. To lower the cost of 10GbE and widely apply it in IT systems, we have been developing a single-chip 10GbE switch LSI and developed the world's first 12-port 10GbE switch LSI. To further expand the field of 10GbE switches, we developed a new 10GbE switch LSI - the MB86C68 - having 20-ports and a built-in 10 Gbps serial interface. This paper describes the MB86C68; the high-speed IO circuit of its built-in 10 Gbps serial interface; and the XG2000 switch box, which features the new LSI.

• Ultrahigh-Speed Optical Fiber Switch and Its Application to Optical Signal Processing

This paper describes an optical parametrically amplified fiber switch and its application. The fiber switch enables the ultrahigh-speed switching of data signals at speeds exceeding terabits per second through optical parametric amplification. The principle and configuration of the switch are shown, and a prototype is used to demonstrate the optical switching of data signals at 160 Gbps. A switching bandwidth over the full transmission band and switching gain exceeding a factor of 10 are achieved. Possible applications of this fiber switch to an optical sampling oscilloscope and optical regeneration are also shown in a systematic demonstration. The fiber switch provides highly efficient and ultrahigh-speed optical signal processing performance, and offers the potential to realize flexible and power-effective performance in future photonic networks.

• Quantum-Dot-Based Photonic Devices

Adopting nano-size semiconductor structures called quantum dots in the active regions of photonic devices can greatly improve the performance of these devices in many respects. This paper introduces our development of technology for quantum-dot lasers and amplifiers with some recent results. In quantum-dot lasers, we have realized temperature-insensitive direct modulation at the modulation rate of 10 Gbps in the 1.3 μm wavelength range. We have also fabricated high-performance optical amplifiers with the wide bandwidth of over 100 nm, high gain of 20 dB, and high output power of over +20 dBm. A venture company called QD laser Inc. has been launched in order to commercialize these high-performance quantum-dot-based photonic devices.

• Ultra High Speed and Ultra Low Noise InP-Based HEMTs

InP-based high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) exhibit a record current cutoff frequency of beyond 500 GHz and a super low noise figure of less than 2 dB even at 100 GHz. Consequently, they are regarded as key devices for next-generation wired/wireless communication systems and precision sensors. This paper describes some fabrication techniques that enhance device uniformity for large-scale integration and provide the frequency response required for high-speed operation. It then describes two sensors that have been developed using our InP-based HEMTs: a 94 GHz passive image sensor and an ultra wide band radar operating in the quasi-millimeter waveband of 23 to 29 GHz. By improving the performance of sensors and transceivers, InP-based HEMTs will accelerate the realization of advanced sensor network systems that support various social infrastructure services, for example, security, disaster-prevention, and transportation.

• Statistical Static Timing Analysis Technology

The continued scaling down of LSI dimensions is causing the size of process variations to increase. Especially, the increase of delay variations is having a significant effect on design periods and performance yield. Statistical Static Timing Analysis (SSTA) has been proposed as a way to more accurately estimate the performance of circuits by considering delay variations statistically. SSTA is expected to reduce design periods and make it possible to predict the performance yield. Fujitsu has researched and developed SSTA tools for use in the design of processors and ASICs. This paper outlines the basic SSTA technologies and introduces Fujitsu's SSTA activities.

• New Ferroelectric Material for Embedded FRAM LSIs

The strong growth of information network infrastructures in our society has enabled personal authentication services for electronic money systems and ticketless transportation services to become firmly established. Secure, high-speed, and low power consumption nonvolatile memories will be required for mobile devices equipped with smart RFID and secure IC cards. The ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM) is one of the best choices for these applications. To meet the market needs, research and development of FRAM to pursue scalability for increased memory capacity, unlimited read/write cycles, and a wider operating voltage range are strongly required. It is also necessary to improve the conventional features of FRAM. In this paper, we introduce a new ferroelectric material that will enable us to fabricate 90 nm FRAM and beyond, focusing on its superior characteristics. We also describe our plans to commercially produce FRAM devices in the near future.

• Thermal Bumps Utilizing Carbon Nanotubes

Due to the continued miniaturization of semiconductor chips, the performance of semiconductor products is rapidly improving. However, at the same time, thermal issues affecting semiconductor chips are becoming serious. For example, heat dissipation has become a very important problem in the CPUs of personal computers, high-power RF amplifiers of mobile communication systems, and power control units of hybrid cars. As a solution to this problem, Fujitsu has been developing heatsinks for semiconductor chips that use high thermal conductivity carbon nanotubes. In this paper, we describe our carbon-nanotube thermal and source bumps for high-power, flip-chip amplifiers in mobile communication base stations as examples of our recent developments in this area.