High-Performance Materials Driving the Industrial Society of Automobiles and Smartphones

At the age of 80, this author is reading Karl Marx’s Capital (Das Kapital, with a preface by Karl Marx, 1867; edited by Friedrich Engels, translated into Japanese by Itsuro Sakisaka, published by Iwanami-Shoten). Having experienced the 1960 protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty during his second year at university, almost 60 years ago, and having lived for eight days in Moscow’s Perestroika, he learned about Capital in the introduction of an automaker’s technical report in 2021. On reflection, he realizes that he has experienced the entire post-war boom time of Japan. This column presents the author’s personal opinions, based on these actual experiences, about the future direction of Japan in respect to engineering and manufacturing industries.

Having survived these boom times, Japan has become a modern “material civilization” through the adoption of technologies from overseas. Japan opened expressways and high-speed rail (Shinkansen bullet train) in 1964, and deregulated its telecommunications industry in 1984. There is a view that, spurred on by these national projects, the automobile industry and information and electronics industry have played leading roles in the global industry and economy to date. With the career of an electronics scholar, the author regularly stayed in the U.S., a capitalist country, over the years. Modern science and technology in the West had its start in the Industrial Revolution centered on the U.K. This ultimately led to the development of the atomic bomb and other nuclear weapons during World War II, with the victorious U.S. becoming a dominant power and developing its own brand of capitalism that is now playing a central part in the world economy. What surprised the author when staying in the U.S., was not only the abundance of commodities available in cities, but the low quality of the materials used in those commodities as well. You see, people do not take care of goods (commodities) made of inferior materials. In the case of passenger cars, drivers in the U.S. think nothing of bumping other cars to make space for themselves or to leave a parking spot. You never see that sort of behavior in Japan.

In 2021, the author received a technical report on some technological development in the mail from an automaker. A company that mainly manufactured steel products for such things as cars. It was a company whose DNA was based on the words of its founder, “Great cars are made with great steel.” A manufacturer that continues to pursue “great materials.” In the introduction of this technical report, it explained the material development mindset as (1) control at the atomic level, (2) alloy sophistication that creates materials with high functionality and high quality, and (3) sensitive and independent response to social needs of the automobile society now and in the future. Modern capitalism is surely based on steady implementation of a long line of such activities on the path to the production of products. Looking at the path the world is currently taking, Marx’s Capital certainly demonstrated a different awareness of the issues. Japan is making groundbreaking discoveries one after the other, with a level of science and technology that exceeds that of the West, making this century ‘the century of Japan.’ This author is proud of the intelligent contributions of the Japanese people, having just discovered the hidden potential for commercialization of their many groundbreaking ideas. That potential is in high-quality materials. It is also in the stability of large corporations that continue to pursue materials of higher and higher quality. High-functionality, high-quality materials improve the social value (trustworthiness) of commodities (products) and support the stable development of a capitalist society. Commodities made of high-quality materials are even driving stable development of the industrial society in this current COVID-19 pandemic. Without the support of Japan’s high-quality materials, it is possible that even Western capitalism would have ended up becoming unstable.

In this column, commodities (products) will be considered in terms of Marx’s Capital. Starting from the question of “what is a commodity?”, Marx determined that the value of a commodity can be summed up as its “use value and exchange value.” These values are derived from human needs. But is this analysis of human needs sufficient? To start with, humans have biological needs—the need to sleep, the need to eat and defecate, and the need to procreate. On top of this, humans as social beings have a need for physical movement, mobility, and creativity (sociality). The need for mobility can be further divided into the need for engine-powered mobility and self-powered mobility, with the former representing the need for long-distance mobility using cars, trains, airplanes, and boats, etc., and the latter representing the need for short-distance mobility using bicycles, etc. In this modern society, with its focus on healthy aging, walking is also an important self-powered mobility need. Trust and reliability are social needs, both modern and sophisticated. They are represented by the word “integrity,” which is one of the five constant virtues of Confucianism. More than 100 years after the Industrial Revolution, the genesis of industry today, the increasing sophistication of industry is remarkable, while the needs of humanity are also changing dramatically as result of this industrial and social development. In the midst of this, the sophistication of materials supports the integrity of products and commodities, and supports industry as well.

Of particular interest to this author in the field of materials are amorphous alloys, which were first developed in 1970 in the laboratory of Professor Pol Duwez at the California Institute of Technology. They were then further developed to enable manufacture in the form of a continuous thin ribbon. In Japan, amorphous wire was developed in 1981 using an underwater ultra-rapid quench method in the laboratory of Professor Tsuyoshi Masumoto at Tohoku University. This new material, a thin ribbon of amorphous wire, was the subject of technological friction between Japan and the U.S., which ended with Japan’s purchase of 40,000 U.S-manufactured pole transformers with amorphous thin ribbon magnetic cores. However, even reflecting the material characteristics in electric power equipment applications, many issues arose that made practical application of amorphous wire difficult.

Amorphous wire is a new material for Japan, a country with a strong focus on materials. It has a smooth surface, long uniform shape, a perfectly circular cross section, and a magnetic concentric structure. Through joint research between Japan and the U.S., the Large Barkhausen Effect, a new magnetic phenomenon, was discovered the year after this wire was developed. The wire has now been exported to supermarkets around the world for more than 20 years through a U.S. venture company. In fact, amorphous wire is a successful example of collaboration between industry, academia and government in Japan, with the 1993 discovery of the skin effect-based magnetic impedance effect using zero-magnetostrictive amorphous wire, and the subsequent 1997 invention of integrated circuit type high-performance micromagnetic sensors (MI sensors). This is a typical example of new high-performance materials from Japan leading to the creation of outstanding devices.

From 2001, these MI sensors have been mass produced for use as electronic compasses in smartphones and other cell phones. Then from 2016, its use for a Magnetic Positioning System (MPS) for autonomous cars was conceptualized and developed. And currently, in 2021, as detailed in the above technical report about a Global Magnetic Positioning System (GMPS), it has passed a series of government agency-led verification trials around Japan. The spread of these MI sensors within society is another great example of social change being achieved through more sophisticated materials.

Now, as a commodity made from high-quality material, MI sensors increase the value of the commodity itself, including in the recycling chain, and increase the price of the commodity through intensive energy use in production. To purchase these commodities, you need income and you need a booming economy, which is also the goal of social development. This is the value of high-quality commodities.

This author has had an association with the manufacturer of MI sensors since a High Tech Consortium held in 1998 by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. This led to mass production of electronic compasses for cell phones from 2001 (and for smartphones from 2011). These electronic compasses are being used in services that provide navigation within smartphone-based walking maps, with positional information acquired from the GPS (or GNSS) and directional information acquired from detection of geomagnetism by the compasses. These services use the smartphone’s electronic compass to detect energy-dispersive environmental information, or geomagnetism, and then provide the smartphone’s orientation to the user. This manufacturer’s electronic compass business expanded in 2014, to production at two companies, with the addition of ROHM Co., Ltd. The manufacturer went on to develop a Global Magnetic Positioning System (GMPS) for autonomous cars in 2016. Between then and now, 2021, the system has successfully passed a series of verification trials around Japan led by the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and other bodies. The system employs a series of ferrite magnetic markers embedded every two meters in a road surface for vehicular traffic (mainly buses), with in-vehicle MI sensor arrays used to differentiate these weak magnetic signals from the significant magnetic noise in road environments. It then stably controls the vehicle’s ability to travel at high speeds on narrow roads and precisely reach its destination. This system is gradually becoming the standard for autonomous driving globally.

As detailed above, modern industry is being driven by information device technologies, such as those in automobiles and smartphones, with those technologies in turn being driven by Japan’s high-performance materials technologies. This is the foundation of industrial development as rediscovered by this author.

2021.04.02