Patents Assigned to Matsushita Electric
  • Patent number: 6680841
    Abstract: A disclosure is made on a solid electrolytic capacitor, which facilitates an assembly work with simple construction to lead to a reduction of cost, realizes excellent equivalent series resistance characteristics and makes a thin configuration possible, and a manufacturing method thereof. With the solid electrolytic capacitor of the present invention, a cathode lead frame has a connecting member to connect integrally with a cathode member of a capacitor element stack body on the side surface of a capacitor element extending in the thickness direction thereof. Capacitor elements, each provided with a through hole on an anode member, are stacked on top of each other in layers and connections between capacitor elements are achieved by disposing an anode lead frame between layers.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 30, 2002
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Kazuo Tadanobu, Takuhisa Sugimoto, Yukihiro Take, Itsuo Kojima, Kazuya Kawahara, Masatoshi Tasei, Masahiro Yabushita
  • Patent number: 6680894
    Abstract: In a optical head, a beam is emitted from a light emitting element in which a plurality of light sources are integrally formed, the light sources being able to emit beams having different wave lengths from one another. An optical system converges the beam coming from any one of the light sources onto an optical information storage medium. An optical separator separates a reflected beam coming from the optical information storage medium from the beam coming from the light source. A light receiving element detects light quantities of the reflected beam separated by the optical separator.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 12, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Hideki Hayashi, Joji Anzai
  • Patent number: 6679942
    Abstract: The present invention provides a chemical adsorption solution prepared by dissolving a silane-based chemical adsorption material in a non-aqueous organic solvent, in which the non-aqueous organic solvent is a mixture including a first non-aqueous organic solvent and a second non-aqueous organic solvent having a boiling point higher than that of the first non-aqueous organic solvent. A preferable difference in the boiling point is at least 10° C. Preferably, the first non-aqueous organic solvent has a boiling point of not more than 120° C. and the second non-aqueous organic solvent has a boiling point of not less than 150° C. The chemical adsorption solution coated on a substrate is concentrated by evaporating the solvent having the lower boiling point, so that a chemically adsorbed film having a uniform film thickness can be formed in a short time.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 13, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventor: Kazufumi Ogawa
  • Patent number: 6681048
    Abstract: An image coding method and apparatus for coding each block of a digital image divided into a plurality of two-dimensional blocks, wherein each block has a plurality of pixels. A coding mode for a target block is determined by a code mode determining section to output mode information of the target block. The mode information of the target block is coded, by a mode information coding section, using mode information of previously coded blocks at the periphery of the target block. Pixel data of the target block is then coded by a block data coding section according to the mode information of the target block. A computer readable recording medium that contains an image coding program is also disclosed.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 20, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventor: Taisuke Matsumoto
  • Patent number: 6680524
    Abstract: A semiconductor device includes: a wiring substrate; a wiring electrode; a semiconductor chip; a connecting member; and a resin encapsulant. The wiring electrode is formed on the wiring substrate. The semiconductor chip is mounted on the wiring substrate and a second bottom face of the semiconductor chip is in contact with the wiring substrate. An electrode pad formed on the semiconductor chip and the wiring electrode are electrically connected to each other with the connecting member. The semiconductor chip, the wiring electrode, and the connecting member, for example, are molded with the resin encapsulant on the upper surface of the wiring substrate. A level difference exists between a first bottom face and the second bottom face of the semiconductor chip. The first and second bottom faces are respectively located at a peripheral portion and a central portion of the semiconductor chip. A part of the resin encapsulant is interposed between the first bottom face and the upper surface of the wiring substrate.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 24, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Masanori Minamio, Hiroaki Fujimoto, Ryuichi Sahara, Toshiyuki Fukuda, Toru Nomura
  • Patent number: 6680903
    Abstract: In a network of a topology of a loop and a bus, occurrence of a failure is detected and a location of the failure is specified. Occurrence of the failure is detected by detecting that a specific signal pattern to be received at regular time intervals within a fixed time period is not received. A node which has detected occurrence of the failure transmits or receives a specifying signal among the nodes, and decide whether or not the failure has occurred adjacently to itself. A packet indicating a decided location of the failure is transmitted or received among nodes, and thereby respective nodes specify the location of the failure. When the failure has occurred at the master node, a node having a smallest node ID after waiting time according to the node ID operates as the alternative master node.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 7, 1999
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Kenichi Moriguchi, Toshihisa Ikeda, Yuji Mizuguchi, Takahisa Sakai, Toshikazu Hattori
  • Patent number: 6680887
    Abstract: This invention relates to an optical disk apparatus for optically reproducing information recorded on an information carrier by an optical beam emitted by a light source, the optical disk apparatus comprising: a converging section for directing the optical beam to the information carrier in a converged state; a light detection section for generating a reproduction signal corresponding to the optical beam reflected by or transmitted through the information carrier; a waveform equalization section for varying a frequency characteristic of the reproduction signal generated by the light detection section; a jitter measuring section for measuring a jitter of a signal output from the waveform equalization section; and a minimum jitter value searching section for determining a minimum value of the jitter in an initial area of an X-Y plane defined by a variable x and a variable y which can vary the jitter measured by the jitter measuring section. A PLL circuit is disclosed.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 10, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Tetsuya Shihara, Takashi Narutani, Katsuya Watanabe
  • Patent number: 6680870
    Abstract: A memory device that is free from problems resulted from the characteristics of nonvolatile memory chips. The problems are specifically those occurring at the time of data transfer between nonvolatile memory chips, e.g., data error or program error occurring after data transfer. In the memory device, an error correction code process unit applies error detection to data read from a nonvolatile memory chip to a data line for data transfer. For such detection, an error correction code for the data is referred to. At the time of data transfer between the nonvolatile memory chips, if the data is detected as containing a correctable error, a writing unit writes the corrected data to a nonvolatile memory, which is the transfer destination. In this manner, at the time of data transfer between the nonvolatile memory chips, the error never fails to be detected before data writing.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 27, 2003
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Masayuki Toyama, Tsutomu Sekibe
  • Patent number: 6681053
    Abstract: A digital signal processing (DSP) method to process rendered text in order to achieve up to 300% of the horizontal resolution on any suitable digital display devices such as LCD, PDP and DLP. When the text is rendered, a single picture element (a “pixel”) of a matrix display screen is actually composed of three “sub-pixels”: one red, one green, and one blue (RGB or BGR). Taken together this sub-pixel triplet makes up what has been traditionally thought of as a single pixel. By staggering and processing the sub-pixel elements horizontally, font resolution is effectively increased to the maximum of 300%. There are three processing steps involved. First, the color image is expanded to a gray scale image having triple the number of horizontal pixels as the original image by interleaving the sub-pixels. Next, a black and white text/graphics (TG) detector is deployed to identify the TG of interest in the gray scale image.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 5, 1999
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventor: Daniel Q. Zhu
  • Patent number: 6681219
    Abstract: Keyword proximity searching in a document database according to a query condition initiates with generation of inverted lists having a location for each instance of the keyword in the document database. A plane-sweep mode is used to efficiently search the inverted lists until an output tuple satisfying proximity criteria in the search query is detected. The method then shifts to a nested-loop search mode to enumerate all possible combinations of the keyword instances that satisfy the proximity search query which are in the neighborhood of the output tuple detected in plane-sweep mode. The method alternates between these two modes of operation until all of the output tuples satisfying the query condition are enumerated.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 29, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventor: Walid G. Aref
  • Patent number: 6680146
    Abstract: An electrode plate unit capable of suppressing the internal short circuit caused by flashing that is formed on the end portion of a positive electrode plate and a battery using the same. The electrode plate unit includes a group of electrode plates in which a plurality of positive electrode plates and a plurality of negative electrode plates are laminated alternately via separators, a positive electrode collector plate connected to one side face of the group of electrode plates for connection to the positive electrode plate, and a negative electrode collector plate connected to another side face of the group of electrode plates for connection to the negative electrode plate, wherein the edge portion of the positive electrode plate is protruded from the edge portion of the negative electrode plate on the entire side face excluding the side face to which the negative electrode collector plate of the group of electrode plates is connected.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 25, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignees: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Toyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha
    Inventors: Shinsuke Fukuda, Naoto Arai, Noriyuki Fujioka, Shinji Hamada
  • Patent number: 6681044
    Abstract: Cursive Chinese characters are analyzed using a semantic matching process whereby radicals within the character are first extracted and used to reduce the search space of the full lexicon to only those characters containing the matching radical. In performing the radical extraction, the input character is normalized and segmented into strokes that are in turn organized based on stroke up/down information and local maxima and minima information. Obscure breakpoints and connecting strokes are removed in the process. Dynamic program matching is then performed on a stroke basis in which stroke substitution costs are assessed on a point-by-point basis through a variety of techniques, including tangent vector analysis, center relationship assessment and starting point/ending point assessment. Dynamic programming costs are normalized based on the length of the reference radical and location dissimilarities are removed.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 29, 2000
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Yue Ma, Chi Zhang
  • Patent number: 6680590
    Abstract: A vibration motor obtains a FAST signal when r.p.m. of the motor is faster than reference speed, whereby an output-driving circuit is controlled by the FAST signal to omit parts of the powering periods of respective phases. The motor thus controls the r.p.m. and increases torque ripple generated from the motor. As a result, vibration magnitude increases and insufficient vibration due to downsizing of the motor can be compensated by the control system.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 28, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Tomohiro Inoue, Yoshiaki Iwayama
  • Patent number: 6680221
    Abstract: A bare chip mounting method includes: a dicing step for dividing a semiconductor wafer into individual IC chips while the semiconductor wafer is being attached to a carrier; a washing step for washing the diced semiconductor wafer; a bump-bonding for carrying the washed semiconductor wafer to an assembly process while the semiconductor wafer is being attached to the carrier so as to form a bump on an electrode pad of the wafer; and a mounting step for mounting each of the IC chips, on which the bump is formed, onto a circuit formation body.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 10, 2002
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Tetsuya Tokunaga, Takahiro Yonezawa, Hiroyuki Kiyomura, Tatsuo Sasaoka, Satoshi Horie
  • Patent number: 6680831
    Abstract: The invention provides a magnetoresistive element in which the pinned magnetic layer includes at least one non-magnetic film and magnetic films sandwiching that non-magnetic film, and the magnetic films are coupled with one another by magnetostatic coupling via the non-magnetic film. This element has an improved thermal resistance. Furthermore, the invention provides a magnetoresistive element in which the pinned magnetic layer is as described above. The magnetic films can be coupled with one another by magnetostatic coupling or antiferromagnetic coupling generating negative magnetic coupling. In this element, the magnetic field shift is reduced. Furthermore, the invention provides a magnetoresistive element in which at least one of the magnetic layers sandwiching the intermediate layer includes an oxide ferrite having a plane orientation with a (100), (110) or (111) plane. A magnetic field is introduced in a direction of the axis of easy magnetization in the plane.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 6, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Masayoshi Hiramoto, Hiroshi Sakakima, Hideaki Adachi, Nozomu Matukawa, Kenji Iijima, Mitsuo Satomi
  • Patent number: 6679685
    Abstract: A method of discharging a fluid, includes feeding a fluid into a gap defined between two surfaces in a closed space, and relatively oscillating the two surfaces to apply relative oscillation with high frequency to the gap so as to occur a squeeze pressure to the gap, and thus intermittently discharging the fed fluid through a discharge port provided in either one of the two surfaces by using the squeeze pressure.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 9, 2002
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Teruo Maruyama, Takashi Sonoda
  • Patent number: 6681075
    Abstract: A data reception apparatus that includes a storage unit 263 for storing a direct directory message body specifying a data block identifier by the reference name, a key information selection unit 258 for obtaining the reference name, a reception unit 152 for receiving multiplexed data of indirect directory message blocks, data blocks, and the direct directory message body data, a separation unit 254 for separating the multiplexed data, a directly obtaining unit 264 for outputting the data block identifier using the direct directory message body, a selection unit 155 for outputting the identifier using indirect directory message bodies, a directory message body obtaining unit 156, an indirect obtaining unit 257, a data block selection unit 253 for selecting the data block according to the output identifier and for extracting a data file, a selection unit 261 for restoring and storing the direct directory message body, and a restoration unit 262.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 9, 2000
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Hiroyuki Waki, Masahiro Oashi, Tatsuya Shimoji
  • Patent number: D485535
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 27, 2003
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Kyo Niwatsukino, Seiji Urano, Shigeru Narakino, Fuminori Hirakawa, Toshihiko Matsuda, Shinya Koga, Yoshimitsu Aizono, Toshisuke Sakai, Toshiyuki Kubota, Makoto Nishida
  • Patent number: D485538
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 21, 2003
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Masaaki Goto, Kazuhiko Maeda
  • Patent number: D485541
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 17, 2003
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2004
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventor: Yoshihiko Asai