Research News

To achieve practical application of the source/drain electrode for sub-22 nm LSIs, Toshiba has proposed a new interface structure that reduces the electrical resistance at the nickel silicide/silicon interface of an electrode to one 10th.

The CRDC has developed a novel speech synthesis method offering high scalability for hardware resources and high-quality speech generation.

The newly developed speech synthesis technology, employing Toshiba's unique plural unit selection and fusion method, dramatically enhances the naturalness of the synthesized speech and achieves quality comparable to recorded human voice. Also, it minimizes the fluctuation of the speech quality depending on the text, which has often been a problem in conventional speech synthesis, and is capable of synthesizing speech continuously with uniform quality from any text source.
The new method optimizes the quality of synthesized speech by customizing the speech unit data according to the available memory capacity and CPU speed and can synthesize high-quality speech having a good balance between human-like voice quality and stability. Thanks to high scalability for hardware resources, it is suitable for various platforms, ranging from embedded applications to server applications.
Toshiba intends to multilingualize this speech synthesis middleware in order to enter the worldwide market for speech synthesis middleware.

Toshiba has developed a decentralized native XML database capable of handling a huge XML (Extensible Markup Language) document of several terabytes. In view of the growing need to store and manage huge amounts of data in XML of the order of several hundred gigabytes or even a terabyte, such as patent data, gene data or global environmental data, database decentralization is indispensable for ensuring practical search responsiveness. Although database decentralization is often thought to deliver performance improvement proportional to the number of servers, communication of XML data between servers is actually a bottleneck preventing realization of the benefit of decentralization. The developed database uses a new mechanism to execute detailed analysis of input search requirements and issue detailed instructions to servers so that wasteful communication of XML data between servers is minimized. Also, high-speed compression of XML data with complicated structure is possible by using a unique compression technology. As a result, the communication bottleneck has been reduced to less than one tenth of that in the case of a conventional method and the benefit of decentralization proportional to the number of servers is achieved. Using XQuery, a standard search language, it is possible for a decentralized database to process advanced search requirements, such as consolidation and subtotaling. Toshiba aims at early commercialization of this database technology for handling patent data and other data-intensive applications.

The CRDC has succeeded in making prototype of a high-performance microchannel reactor capable of extracting hydrogen from liquid fuels such as dimethyl ether (DME) and methanol. Though only 10 cm³ in size, the prototype microchannel reactor can produce hydrogen at 240 cm³/min, a rate equivalent to a fuel cell generating approximately 20 W. The wall of a metallic parallel channel with a depth of 6 mm and a width of 150 µm formed inside the microchannel reactor supports the reforming of fuel into hydrogen by Pt catalyst. As a result, 1) diffusion of raw gas to the channel wall is facilitated, 2) heat transfer to the wall is facilitated, 3) specific surface area of the catalyst is improved and 4) pressure loss is reduced.
Using this microchannel reactor to reform DME and water supplied as fuels, the CRDC has achieved hydrogen production at a rate of 240 cm³/min. Moreover, carbon oxide (CO) contained in the reformed gas at a concentration of about 3% is reduced to 60 ppm because the microchannel reactor supports CO shift catalyst and selective methanation catalyst. Although the reforming temperature is 350 oC, the insulator surface temperature is suppressed to less than 50 oC by using thin insulation technology suitable for mobile applications. The volume of the reforming and CO reduction unit, including the insulation material, is about 150 cm³, which is palm size.

Random number generation is the basis of the encryption security technology underpinning our increasingly networked society. Toshiba has developed a technology enabling compact, high-speed random number generation. A fast random number generation rate of 0.12 MHz is achieved using MOSFET with an insulation layer containing Si nanocrystal and a simple random noise conversion circuit. Si nanocrystal MOSFET is structured such that entry and exit of electrons between a channel and Si nanocrystals are conspicuous in order to intensify random noise.
The Si nanocrystal MOSFET device opens up the possibility of a small-size, MHz-generation-rate random number generator suitable for almost all security applications in a computerized world.

Toshiba is actively promoting HD-DVD as the next-generation DVD for high-definition TV (HDTV) content.
HD-DVD has numerous advantages, for example, it is easy to for players and recorders to provide compatibility with the current DVD format and thin drives suitable for notebook PCs can be realized. There are three HD-DVD formats: read only, write once and rewritable. The rewritable format, HD-DVD RAM, has 20 GB capacity on a single side. CRDC has developed a thin-film manufacturing process suitable for mass production of rewritable disks. The key is SiOC film consisting of silicon oxide and carbon with low refractive index. A thin-film formation process, which is more than three times faster than the conventional process, has been developed, enabling manufacturing throughput for HD-DVD RAM disks comparable to that for the current rewritable DVD disks.

CRDC has developed a technology that will allow anyone to integrate information available on the Internet intothe real world in ubiquitous computing environment. Using this technology, for example, a consumer can receive information on the reputation of a product and related products in real time by scanning the barcode of the product using a mobile-phone camera. Scanning the barcode will trigger retrieval of product information from the Internet as well as analysis of related blogs. This will be possible because the meanings of words used in various ways are associated by using ontologies.An ontology is a set of cabulary expressed as a graph by linking related words. By referring to an ontology, it is possible to identify synonyms and relationships between words. We have completed prototype of the system. To evaluate its speed and accuracy, a demonstration experiment has been underway since February 2006 at a real store.

Toshiba is collaborating with the Media Laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the GlobalMind project to establish a multilingual knowledge database of common sense. The GlobalMind website, which is the vehicle for this project, has been launched. (URL:http://globalmind.media.mit.edu/) In terms of its concept and research themes, the GlobalMind project reflects how crucially important it is for computers to understand people's situations, feelings and the significance of information. Toshiba will pursue R&D of technologies for rocessing and utilizing common sense in collaboration with MIT. Targeting practical applications, CRDC will focus on combining the knowledge database in Japanese with Toshiba's natural language processing and knowledge processing technologies.