The authors propose a new method for tunnel illumination using LED lights. The luminous characteristics of tunnel lighting employing LED luminaires were measured in the Shiratori tunnel on the Japanese expressway. The results show that this method achieves over 0.9 of luminance uniformity. Moreover, the visual impression evaluation that was conducted using 29 subjects, shows that roads with over 0.9 luminance uniformity and luminance of 2.3 cd/m 2 , have equivalent or better visibility than roads with low uniformity and luminance of 3.5 cd/m 2. This result suggests that the High Luminance Uniformity Method which we propose could save up to 20 of the energy used for illumination and improve safety due to higher visibility.

The authors introduce LED tunnel illumination for improving the vertical illuminance by considering the light as vectors when designing the light distribution. This new illuminating devices installed and evaluated the visibility of the road at Hanzan Tunnel for the down line of Takamatsu Expressway. As the result, the vertical illuminance is improved by 40% when increasing the ratio of vector component of light by using the Pro-bean. Actually, according to the questionnaire result of subjects who had a driver s licence were different by gender, ages and driving experience, by increasing the vertical illuminance the visibility of the leading vehicle are improved significantly. Therefore, it is expected that the Pro-Beam illumination for improving the visibility by increasing the vertical illuminance is effective in reducing traffic accidents in tunnel.

The prompt progress of photomask pattern shrinking leads to the overlooking for significant defects. To improve the defect detection performance, patterns must be observed thoroughly at first. These observations are also important for a total diagnostic of the lithography process. Our developing reticle inspection machine LM5000 is very suitable for such analyses. With LM5000, users are able to point any positions on the reticle very easily, view the images, measure the lengths or widths of the patterns, and the intensity at each pixel. Users are also able to apply various image processing algorithms. To follow the growth of the semiconductor processes, inspection algorithms should be developed within very short terms. LM5000 adopts a special image processing core consisted of "IMAP". It has strong processing power of a super computer class, and it is programmable even by a C-like language. Libraries for development include most of the standard image processing functions. Its flexibility helps us for reducing the development periods of the new algorithms. In this presentation, the functions of the user interface of LM5000 are displayed as a mask analyzing tool, and the effects of the IMAP processing is explained.