OITDA reveals its sensing roadmap

17 Jun 2002

Japan's optoelectronic industry association says integrating sensors and networks is essential.

OITDA roadmap

Optical sensing technology must be integrated with networks if the industry is to grow, according to the latest roadmap published by Japan's Optoelectronic Industry and Technology Development Association, (OITDA).

"To realize useful, fulfilling lives for individuals in society, a fusion of network and sensing technologies has to occur," says Hiroshi Tsuchiya of Hamamatsu Photonics, a member of OITDA's measurement sensing roadmap committee. "We have called this vital concept 'measurement sensing networks'."

The OITDA forecasts that integrating environmental sensing with network technologies will be critical to monitoring applications such as water quality, education, farm data and also detecting potential disasters. However the association believes that Japan is already ahead of the rest of the world as optoelectronic sensor-based toll collection systems and traffic information networks are already in place on major Japanese toll roads.

The roadmap also forecasts that the use of attosecond lasers will push the frontiers of sensing into the "ultimate limit" ranges of sensitivity. Predicting that these limits will be reached by 2015, the OITDA emphasizes the importance of lasers in driving progress.

Femtosecond lasers have already realized terahertz-sensing ranges, but the association says that attosecond and X-ray lasers are key to extending limits to ultimate ranges.

The OITDA believes that developments in optical sensing will bring us robot surgery by 2005, micromachine surgery on capillaries and cells by 2010, and intra-organal surgery by 2015. The association also predicts that increased resolutions in optical coherence tomography (OCT), a non-invasive medical imaging application, will allow physicians to image the entire human body.

Ultra-supercomputers will be critical to data sensing, predicts the OITDA. DNA chips - solid-state chips that are scanned with lasers to read DNA data - produce huge volumes of data that today's supercomputers cannot easily process. But Tsuchiya believes that ultra-supercomputers, with predicted speeds of 100 teraflops within 10 years, will drive dynamic bio-sensing breakthroughs.

"Computer speeds are increasing according to Moore's Law," he said. "In 15 years, computers will be 1000 times more powerful than today's versions."

The OITDA concludes that new breakthroughs combined with current technology will bring significant lifestyle changes and create completely new industries.

Author
Charles Whipple is a freelance journalist based in Japan.