Thermal voltage converters have been widely used in the electric standard field as a major method to derive AC voltage standards from DC voltage standards. However, there are only a limited number of organizations that are capable of fabricating thermal voltage converters. Furthermore, establishing AC-DC voltage standards has been constrained by the lack of high-quality thermal converters. High-quality thermal converters are used only by national metrology institutes (NMIs) because the conventional thermal converters are too fragile for many calibration laboratories. The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has developed new thin-film multi-junction thermal converters(TFMJTCs) to realize a reliable high-performance thermal converter. Development of a durable TFMJTC with a heater on an aluminum nitride (AlN) substrate is expected to make significant contribution to Japanese calibration laboratories.

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Green Photonics is expected to reduce energy consumption and pollution associated with a broad range of manufacturing processes. This paper is a study on the development of laser-based methods and their applications. High precision surface processing of various materials is a key technology for practical industrial applications. Well-defined micro-fabrication with high-speed and high-quality treatment of materials was performed by laser irradiation. The technical challenges are particularly great in this area, but recent developments in laser processing have opened up new frontiers. Due to advances in laser processing systems, and greater understanding of the phenomenon of diverse excited states generated by laser irradiation, these methods can be considered mature and versatile techniques that present some key benefits over other more established fabrication techniques.

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In recent years, manufacturing companies are being challenged to meet various social demands including short-term delivery, multiobjective production, quality assurance and traceability security. In order to meet these demands, keep and strengthen competitiveness, it is necessary for those companies to introduce IT. However, since it is often too expensive for small and medium sized enterprises to develop, operate and maintain IT systems, they cannot introduce them. We have developed an IT system development framework “MZ Platform” which enables manufacturing industry workers to construct and operate IT systems without professional IT knowledge, in order to encourage manufacturing companies to introduce IT systems. We describe our research and development approach and dissemination activities, and discuss effects of MZ Platform.

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