Panasonic

About: Panasonic is a company organization based out in Kadoma, Ôsaka, Japan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Signal & Layer (electronics). The organization has 49129 authors who have published 71118 publications receiving 942756 citations. The organization is also known as: Panasonikku Kabushiki-gaisha & Panasonic.

A molecularly engineered hole-transporting material for efficient perovskite solar cells

Abstract: Solution-processable perovskite solar cells have recently achieved certified power conversion efficiencies of over 20%, challenging the long-standing perception that high efficiencies must come at high costs. One major bottleneck for increasing the efficiency even further is the lack of suitable hole-transporting materials, which extract positive charges from the active light absorber and transmit them to the electrode. In this work, we present a molecularly engineered hole-transport material with a simple dissymmetric fluorene–dithiophene (FDT) core substituted by N,N-di-p-methoxyphenylamine donor groups, which can be easily modified, providing the blueprint for a family of potentially low-cost hole-transport materials. We use FDT on state-of-the-art devices and achieve power conversion efficiencies of 20.2% which compare favourably with control devices with 2,2′,7,7′-tetrakis(N,N-di-p-methoxyphenylamine)-9,9′-spirobifluorene (spiro-OMeTAD). Thus, this new hole transporter has the potential to replace spiro-OMeTAD. The efficiency of perovskite solar cells is limited by the performance of the hole-transport material, which extracts charges from the active layer. Here, a molecularly engineered hole transporter with performance comparable to spiro-OMeTAD is demonstrated.

Shaping Electronic Communication: The Metastructuring of Technology in the Context of Use

Abstract: We argue that the use of electronic communication technologies in changing organizational forms can be facilitated by the explicit and ongoing adaptation of those technologies to changing contexts of use. This paper reports on an exploratory study of the use of a computer conferencing system in a Japanese R&D project group. We found that the system's use was significantly influenced by the activities of a few individuals who shaped users' interaction with the conferencing technology, modified features of the technology, and altered the context of use. These activities---which we call technology-use mediation---promoted effective electronic communication both initially at the point of adoption, as well as over time as needs, preferences, experiences, and conditions changed. Drawing on these insights, we develop a theoretical framing of the mediation process which suggests that it can be a powerful organizational mechanism for helping organizations provide the ongoing attention and resources needed to adapt electronic communication technologies to changing conditions, contexts, and organizational forms.

Scale-Aware Fast R-CNN for Pedestrian Detection

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the problem of pedestrian detection in natural scenes. Intuitively, instances of pedestrians with different spatial scales may exhibit dramatically different features. Thus, large variance in instance scales, which results in undesirable large intracategory variance in features, may severely hurt the performance of modern object instance detection methods. We argue that this issue can be substantially alleviated by the divide-and-conquer philosophy. Taking pedestrian detection as an example, we illustrate how we can leverage this philosophy to develop a Scale-Aware Fast R-CNN (SAF R-CNN) framework. The model introduces multiple built-in subnetworks which detect pedestrians with scales from disjoint ranges. Outputs from all of the subnetworks are then adaptively combined to generate the final detection results that are shown to be robust to large variance in instance scales, via a gate function defined over the sizes of object proposals. Extensive evaluations on several challenging pedestrian detection datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SAF R-CNN. Particularly, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Caltech [P. Dollar, C. Wojek, B. Schiele, and P. Perona, “Pedestrian detection: An evaluation of the state of the art,” IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. , vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 743–761, Apr. 2012], and obtains competitive results on INRIA [N. Dalal and B. Triggs, “Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. , 2005, pp. 886–893], ETH [A. Ess, B. Leibe, and L. V. Gool, “Depth and appearance for mobile scene analysis,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Comput. Vis ., 2007, pp. 1–8], and KITTI [A. Geiger, P. Lenz, and R. Urtasun, “Are we ready for autonomous driving? The KITTI vision benchmark suite,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit ., 2012, pp. 3354–3361].

Enhanced electronic properties in mesoporous TiO2 via lithium doping for high-efficiency perovskite solar cells

Abstract: Perovskite solar cells are one of the most promising photovoltaic technologies with their extraordinary progress in efficiency and the simple processes required to produce them. However, the frequent presence of a pronounced hysteresis in the current voltage characteristic of these devices arises concerns on the intrinsic stability of organo-metal halides, challenging the reliability of technology itself. Here, we show that n-doping of mesoporous TiO2 is accomplished by facile post treatment of the films with lithium salts. We demonstrate that the Li-doped TiO2 electrodes exhibit superior electronic properties, by reducing electronic trap states enabling faster electron transport. Perovskite solar cells prepared using the Li-doped films as scaffold to host the CH3NH3PbI3 light harvester produce substantially higher performances compared with undoped electrodes, improving the power conversion efficiency from 17 to over 19% with negligible hysteretic behaviour (lower than 0.3%).

Electronic musical instrument

Abstract: In a keyboard electronic musical instrument having tone generators of frequency divider systems, every key is associated with and controls a plurality of tone keyers which respectively gate tone signals having frequencies being harmonically related with each other. The tone signal gated by one of the keyers is passed through a frequency shifter, while the tone signal gated by the rest of the keyers is not. Among the tone keyers, the above-mentioned one is a keyer for producing an attack signal, while the remainder are keyers for producing a normal lasting signal. Both signals, now being slightly out of harmonic relation, are mixed together and finally transduced into sound by a loudspeaker. The produced sound has subtly fine musical results with a sense of many different tone sources as in an individual--oscillator system instrument.