Friday in Hamamatsu and the Advanced Surau

Its Firday, its freezing out... Friday prayers start at 12.15pm here and is done at the university foreign student lounge. Khutbah is in Malay. The Imam is either a Malaysian or and Indonesian student. My Friday routine is a little different from in Malaysia. Usually in Malaysia I'd have lunch 1st before the prayers. Here, I'd have lunch before and after the prayers. This is the only day I get to meet the cool undergraduates.

monitors

power cables

chip gold bonding microscope

I dont want people especially my family back home in Malaysia to get the impression from reading my blog entries that I'm just hanging out with my family here in Japan, thus today I'm writing about the most advanced surau in the Institute of Electronics. You can see wires everywhere. Monitors everywhere. It has a 'bilik suci' (clean room) for developing microchips... I guess you'd figure it out by now that this Surau is actually the measurement and testing laboratory that I have access to. This is where we carry out experiments on chips that we designed. Since theres 3 muslims in my lab, we use this room for prayers.

Communication wires

clean room

data wires/lines

more monitors

Hi Speed Video Camera Prototype

This here is a picture of a high speed image video camera, capable of grabbing 5000frames per second. The sensor is of CMOS technology safely tucked into a pentium like chip package and was designed by one of my lab mates. The colorfull picture shows the standard test picture used and the printed pictures show what the sensor captured at varying frame rates. I'm going to use this sensor to capture high speed videos of my water rockets...

This setup here is used to test the capability of the Wide Dynamic Range CMOS Sensor also developed here. The WD Sensor designed here outperforms a CCD camera in and has won this lab another award ( I cant remember the award name).

TOF Chip

Finally my project. The CMOS Time-of-Flight Range Image Sensor. Its used to grab 3D video. These are the chip(s) my team and I designed. Infrared light is foucsed onto this chip using this bandpass IR filter lens. The chips working principle is to calculate the time it takes for an IR light signal to propogate from the scene to the camera, hence the name time-of-flight (TOF). From the TOF, real time 3D video can be displayed on screen. Here's the test 3D camera. Now I'm working on the 'commercially available' version...


TOF Test Equipment



TOF Camera dismanteled...


I'm also so lucky that this room isnt where my workstation is. If not, I'd be working ina mess. Students and researchers workstations are seperated from the test labs. We are placed in nice clean rooms throughout this institute...

Petang ni aku join abang, geng sakit muntah-muntah... Tapi abangdah nak baik... Ni mesti sebab aku gelak-gelakkan abangv semalam...