TRIZ Case Study of a Past Invention:
TechOptimizer Implementation Example:   High Efficiency DC-DC Converter for Liquid Crystal Display Watches
Mitsuo Morihisa (Sharp Corporation, Japan)   Partially presented first in English at Invention Machine Corporation 1999 User Group Conference, Oct. 17-19, 1999, Boston, MA, USA;    Contributed in Japanese on Oct. 19, 2000 and posted here on Nov. 1, 2000.

Editor's Note (Toru Nakagawa, Nov. 1, 2000)

     Two weeks ago the Editor received this Case Study paper written in Japanese and already edited in an HTML format.  It was a thoughful contribution by Mr. Mitsuo Morihisa, Sharp Corporation, to our WWW site "TRIZ Home Page in Japan" which celebrates its second anniversary today.

     The paper was first presented in part in English at the 3rd IM User Group Conference one year ago.  Now it has been written in its full extension in Japanese and is posted here in our Japanese page together with a number of illustrating fugures.

     For industrial engineers it is very difficult to publish their application of TRIZ to their real problems, even though such case studies are needed for understanding and promoting TRIZ in industries.  So the present author Mr. Morihisa analyzed his own technology development work in the early 1970s and evaluated how TRIZ software tools could have been used if they had existed in those days.  This approach is valuable for us to obtain confidence in the effectiveness of TRIZ by ourselves.  Inside each company recent/current cases can be used for such analyses, while old but excellent cases need to be used for publication and for wider promotion of TRIZ.

      The full paper is posted in the Japanese page, while its English Abstract presented a year ago is posted in this English page.  We are told that the author has a plan of translating his paper into English in the near future for wider publication.

TechOptimizer Implementation Example
          (High efficiency DC-DC converter for liquid crystal display watches)

                 by  Mitsuo Morihisa  (Sharp Corporation, Japan)

Presented at Invention Machine Corporation 1999 User Group Conference,
Oct. 17-19, 1999, Boston, MA, USA

Abstract:

The effectiveness of TechOptimizer is reported through a past invention (USP: 4,279,010) of mine written in 1975 without using TechOptimizer . This invention comprises a DC-DC converter for liquid crystal display watches. It was inevitable to achieve voltage conversion from 1.5V to 15-20V with over 90% conversion efficiency as the former DSM liquid crystal display required 15-20V and the life of the battery had to be longer than 1 year.  Usually, a voltage conversion process requires 2 functions; the alternating current generation and the voltage transformation.  As a watch system has an internal clock signal, the former function can be trimmed and only the latter one was inevitable. After laborious investigations to find voltage transformation principles and examples, I found a report written in 1919 by M. Schenkel, a German engineer.  His circuit comprises a combination of capacitors and rectifiers to generate ultra high voltage of over 100KV.  I applied his principle and could realize in the 1.5V world a voltage conversion efficiency of over 90% using capacitors and field effect transistors.  I will talk in the presentation how TechOptimizer  could help a solitary inventor in the electronic circuit's field, too.

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Last updated on Nov. 1, 2000.     Access point:  Editor: nakagawa@utc.osaka-gu.ac.jp