The Nowand Future of RionCan you tell us something about your job, Mr. Kazama? My job is to develop sound level meters. These are longstand-ing Rion products, and I’m trying to add new value while inheriting traditional aspects of devices and technologies. Sound level meters are products that connect the past to the future. It’s one of Rion’s major business areas, so I do feel a cer-tain pressure. My research and de-velopment work handles four main areas: microphones for sensing sound; electric circuits for relaying the sound captured; digital pro-cessing; and applications for visual presentation. My major focus is to consider the power and cost bal-ance among these four areas. We could make a product with superior performance that still fails in busi-ness because it’s too expensive.What changes do you foresee in the development of sound level me-ters? One customer once told me sound level meters were simply tools for making measurements and that, like rulers, they could be used forever.Still, I think the needs of our customers have changed over the years. In trying to meet these changing needs, we add new value—for example, by transform-ing wired models into wireless models or adding new value with a function to connect to the Internet. Our customers would no doubt be very happy if we were to lower the prices of our instruments, as a matter of course, as well as reduce the operating costs. To meet these needs, we believe we also must change.Can you tell us about your job, Mr. Yaguchi? I work on developing liq-uid-borne particle counters, which are mainly used in the development of semiconductor devices. With semiconductor devices growing smaller and smaller, there’s a growing need for particle detectors capable of detecting even finer particles. For semiconduc-tor devices, there’s something called a design rule, which specifies the width of the wiring. And this width is current-ly on the order of 5 nm and 7 nm. But the lower measuring limit of grain diam-eter for the most advanced particle counters is 20 nm. So, we haven’t been able to keep pace with the frontlines of semiconductor devel-opment.Do you see future demand for measuring ner particles? I do. As semiconductor tec-h nologies are said to continue mov-ing to the 1 nm scale, engineers now explore new approaches be-sides simply pursuing measuring finer particles, since they’ll inev-itably reach a limit if they don’t. One idea that’s been proposed is to control the properties of the liquids themselves—namely, pure water and the solutions used for semi-conductor development, rather than measuring the particles they contain. The direction of research needed to bring this idea to life is unclear at this point.If semiconductor development shifts towards controlling the liq-uid itself, could that make particle measurements obsolete? It’s possible. If really ad-vanced technologies emerge that can completely eliminate impuri-ties from liquids, the need for par-ticle measurements might decline. But that applies just to the most advanced technologies. For the foreseeable future, I think we’ll see a continuing need for particle mea-surements in domains for which such advanced control is difficult in terms of costs. In other words, I think needs will diversify.Incidentally, does Rion provide opportunities for engineers who work in dierent areas to meet and exchange opinions? Yes. We regularly have what we call interdisciplinary sessions. I’ve been involved in signal process-ing for 10 years or so, and signal processing technologies have appli-cations to all products like hearing aids and audiometers. Learning about the technologies others de-velop from a different approach and exchanging ideas others might find novel has a lot of potential. But Rion’s divisions—medical in-struments, environmental instru-ments, and particle counters—are highly specialized. They operate independently of each other. Each has its own special history of development. These barriers can be hard to cross when creating Ryosuke KazamaS&V Measuring Instrument Development Group, Product De-velopment Department, Technical Development Center. Certied environmental measurer (noise and vibration). Since joining Rion in 2011, he’s been involved in developing measur-ing instruments associated with sound and vibration.Future TechnoloFUTURE TALK 1010
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