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Category Archives: illumination

Hive Lighting wins $25,000 in So. Cal. business pitch competition

20 Nov

Hive Lighting, Inc. of Los Angeles, CA recently won first prize and a $25,000 cash investment in the Seventh Annual “Survivor” business pitch competition for Southern California entrepreneurs, held by Tech Coast Venture Network last week at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

Hive Lighting produces a line of lamps for the film, television, digital, and stage production industries that, according to its website, utilize single-point plasma sources that last “10,000+ hours, are flicker-free, [provide] universal orientation, and produce full, even spectrum 5600 CCT daylight balanced light with a CRI of 94.”  According to Hive Lighting’s CEO, Robert Rutherford, Hive’s products utilize 50%-90% less energy than conventional filament-based lamps.

Hive Lighting is a portfolio company of the LA CleanTech Incubator, and the company’s win at TCVN’s “Survivor” event comes soon after the company took top honors and $20,000 at the California Clean Tech Open in October.  The company also won “Best New Lighting Technology” awards from CineGear Expo and TVBEurope’s “Best of IBC Awards” earlier in 2012.

A search of the USPTO database finds one published patent application (U.S. Pat. Appl. Publ. No. 2012/0230030) assigned to Hive Lighting for hexagonal-shaped modular light housings that can be interconnected together to “form a tesselation array” (i.e., a two-dimensional array of lamps).  Looking at the figures of this U.S. patent application, the origin of the company’s name is clear.

A check of the patent application’s status shows that the company had requested that the USPTO not publish the patent application, but the non-publication request was not recognized by the USPTO because it was not signed properly by the patent attorney filing the application.  An electronic signature (or “S-signature”) was used, which requires a first forward slash, then an alphanumeric identifying sequence, followed by a second forward slash (e.g., /Bruce Itchkawitz/).  But apparently, since the filed S-signature did not include the trailing forward slash, it was not recognized by the USPTO.  (Just another reason that I use a handwritten signature wherever possible, not an S-signature.)

 
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Posted by on November 20, 2012 in green technology, illumination, plasma

 

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Aurora Lighting sued by Philips for patent infringement

06 Nov

On November 2, 2012, Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. and Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions, Inc. filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, accusing Aurora Lighting Inc. of patent infringement of seven U.S. patents for light-emitting diode lighting technology. 

         

The accused Aurora devices include various LED retrofit bulbs designed to be installed in conventional light sockets, as well as downlight flat panel products and wallwasher products.  The asserted patents disclose various power supply configurations (see here, here, and here), multicolor bulbs (see here and here), and luminaire configurations (see here and here). 

Some of the asserted patents were among the dozens of U.S. patents obtained by Philips through its acquisition of Color Kinetics, Inc. in 2007 for a purchase price of about $791 million.  Color Kinetics was then renamed to become Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions, Inc. 

 
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Posted by on November 6, 2012 in illumination, infringement, LED, light emitting diode, patent law

 

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LED dazzler shield; Stellar Photonics LLC; U.S. Pat. No. 7,980,720

20 Oct

U.S. Patent No. 7,980,720, issued on July 19, 2011 to Stellar Photonics, LLC of Bellvue, WA, discloses a shield with a plurality of LEDs designed to temporarily blind an assailant.

      

According to the ’720 patent, existing devices used by law enforcement and the military for subduing people in a non-lethal manner have serious safety issues.  For example, chemical irritants (e.g., tear gas) and Taser® high-voltage weaponry have been criticized as being inhumane and unsafe when not properly used, and water cannons can inflict sufficiently high forces to cause significant injuries.  The invention disclosed by the ’720 patent is designed to create a brief, intense flash of light that momentarily blinds a viewer so that the viewer is disoriented or “dazzled.”  While the use of blinding laser weapons is banned by international treaty (1995 United Nations Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons), the ’720 patent uses LED light sources incorporated in a shield, which can also be bulletproof.

According to its website, Stellar Photonics “applies its innovation and expertise to generate solutions for both military and commercial clients.”  Its laser and optics applications division has developed a line of Retina-Safe™ Dazzlers (RSD) for both military and civilian law enforcement use to “temporarily overwhelm an adversary’s field of view, provide non-verbal warning and an opportunity to clarify intent.”

According to the USPTO database, the ’720 patent is Stellar Photonics’ second U.S. patent. 

 

 
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Posted by on October 20, 2011 in illumination, LED, weaponry

 

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Using LEDs to illuminate a microdisplay; Luminus Devices, Inc.; U.S. Pat. No. 7,934,841

20 Jul

U.S. Patent No. 7,934,841, issued on May 3, 2011 to Luminus Devices, Inc. of Billerica, MA, discloses a method of illuminating a microdisplay using multiple LEDs.

   

According to the ’841 patent, microdisplays, such as digital light processors (DLPs) or liquid crystal displays (LCDs), used in various types of projectors (e.g., rear projection TVs, portable projectors) can be illuminated with multiple high-intensity LEDs.  To enhance light extraction from the LED, the surface of the LED can be patterned to spatially vary its dielectric function.  The ’841 patent discloses that a non-periodic pattern (e.g., aperiodic pattern, quasicrystalline pattern, Robinson pattern, or Ammann pattern) can be used to good effect.

According to its website, Luminus uses its “Big Chip LED” technology to produce high-performance LEDs for various applications, including lamp-free projectors with lifetimes in excess of 60,000 hours.  The company is purportedly considering going public sometime in 2012.  According to the USPTO database, Luminus has received two U.S. patents in 2011 (including the ’841 patent), and received 12 U.S. patents in 2010.  Luminus has received a total of 52 U.S. patents, 12 of which are U.S. design patents.

 
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Posted by on July 20, 2011 in illumination, imaging, light emitting diode

 

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Uniform illumination from small light sources; RPC Photonics, Inc.; U.S. Pat. No. 7,918,583

03 May

U.S. Patent No. 7,918,583, issued on April 5, 2011 to RPC Photonics, Inc. of Rochester, NY, discloses an illumination device for producing uniform illumination from small light sources such as LEDs.

   

As described by the ’583 patent, various systems used to collect and collimate light from small sources, such as LEDs, suffer from non-uniform light distributions.  For example, for paraboloid reflector systems (such as are often found in flashlights), “true collimation of all the light … cannot be achieved, [since] such designs compromise between the divergence of the light and the uniformity of the resulting beam.”  Catadioptric designs can provide highly collimated beams, but when used with a smal source and a diffuser for general illumination applications, the light pattern can have one or more undesirable bright spots.  The ’583 patent discloses a lighting device or “luminaire” with a LED source, a collimator, and a diffuser that provides an angularly dependent output light intensity so as to generate a predetermined illumination pattern. 

According to its website, RPC Photonics started as a spin-off from the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics in 1989, was acquired by Corning, Inc. in 1999, and spun-out from Corning in 2003.  The company “focuses on design, prototyping and manufacturing of optical components with precision structureed surfaces that can be applied to control light and distribute it in a highly efficient manner.” According to the USPTO database, RPC Photonics owns three U.S. patents, including the ’583 patent.

The company’s website includes a presentation titled “LED Luminaire with Controlled Light Distribution,” which appears to disclose the invention of the ’583 patent.  This presentation was given at the 2006 SPIE Optics and Photonics Conference in San Diego, CA on August 17, 2006.  Not coincidently, the filing date of the patent application that resulted in the ’583 patent was one day earlier, August 16, 2006. 

In most countries, patent protection is not available if the patent application is filed after the invention is first disclosed to the public.  The act of publicly disclosing the invention without a patent application already on file is considered in such countries to be an act of surrender of any patent rights.  By virtue of international treaties, the filing of the U.S. patent application satisfies this condition in most foreign countries.  Therefore, if RPC Photonics wanted to pursue foriegn patent protection for the “LED luminaire” invention, it had to make sure that its patent application was filed prior to its SPIE presentation, which it did. 

U.S. patent laws are less draconian.  The U.S. gives inventors a one-year grace period to get their patent application filed after the first public use or offer for sale in the U.S., or after the first printed publication description anywhere in the world.  Thus, a company only interested in pursuing U.S. patent protection has one year to disclose or offer to sell the invention to potential customers in determining if there’s sufficient interest in the marketplace to warrant filing a patent application.  However, at the early stages, it’s often not known whether an invention is valuable enough to pursue foreign protection, so it’s generally a good idea to get the U.S. patent application on file before undertaking such activities, as RPG Photonics did, to keep the option open. 

 
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Posted by on May 3, 2011 in illumination, light emitting diode

 

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Stereo telestration for robotic surgery; Intuitive Surgical Operations, Inc.; U.S. Pat. No. 7,907,166

30 Mar

U.S. Patent No. 7,907,166, issued on March 15, 2011 to Intuitive Surgical Operations, Inc. of Sunnyvale, CA, discloses a telestrator of three-dimensional images for robotic surgery.

                

Anyone who has watched sports on television in the past 30 years has seen a “telestrator” in action.  John Madden became famous in part for using telestrations to annotate his football color commentary with X’s, O’s, and arrows to demonstrate the inner workings of the game.  The telestrations we are familiar with are displayed on a single television monitor, so they are limited to two-dimensional images.  However, for robotic surgery, three-dimensional images are provided by two monitors, which display two complementary images that, when presented to the surgeon’s two eyes, generate a dual-image, stereo-view of the surgical site.  According to the ’166 patent, it can be helpful for a mentor (e.g., a teacher or instructor) to provide guidance to the operator of the system using telestrations, but a mono-visual telestration overlaying only one of the images can be difficult to use.  The ’166 patent discloses a system and method for generating and displaying three-dimensional, stereo-view telestration graphics using both the left-eye image and the right-eye image.

According to its website, Intuitive Surgical, founded in 1995, is “the global technology leader in robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS)” and markets the da Vinci Surgical System, the first robotic surgical system cleared by the FDA.  Worldwide, there are now almost 1,700 da Vinci systems installed in over 1,500 hospitals.  The company’s website includes a number of videos that demonstrate the uses and advantages of the da Vinci system. 

UPDATE: For anyone too squemish to watch the da Vinci system being used in an operation, I recently saw this video that shows a da VInci system being used to fold a tiny paper airplane.

As would be expected for such intricate medical devices, Intuitive Surgical holds hundreds of U.S. and foreign patents and hundreds of field-of-use licenses on various aspects of the company’s technology, including the user’s console, robotic arms, vision system, and positioning system.  In 2010, the company was awarded 30 U.S. patents, and has received 11 U.S. patents so far in 2011, including the ’166 patent. 

 
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Posted by on March 30, 2011 in illumination, imaging, medical, optical network, remote sensing, Uncategorized

 

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Illumination system for rear projection displays; Ostendo Tech., Inc.; U.S. Pat. No. 7,889,430

06 Mar

U.S. Patent No. 7,889,430, issued on February 15, 2011 to Ostendo Technologies, Inc. of Carlsbad, CA, discloses an LED-based illumination system for rear projection displays.

 

Rear projection display (RPD) devices generate images using a small imager having many pixels that can be individually turned off and on to project a much larger image onto a screen spaced away from the imager.  For example, one type of imager is a digital micro-mirror (DMM) device which has hundreds of thousands of microscopic mirrors that can be individually moved to reflect light from an illumination source either to the screen or not, effectively turning the pixel on or off. According to the ’430 patent, the geometric extent or “etendue” of the light emitted from conventional illumination sources (e.g., LEDs) is significantly larger than that for the imager, resulting in poor efficiency of such a conventional RPD device.  The ’430 patent discloses an illumination system that “folds” the etendue of the illumination source so that it better matches that of the imager. 

According to its website, Ostendo “develops next generation Solid State Lighting (SSL)-based display technologies and products.”  The company is mostly known for its CRVD™ 43″ curved desktop monitor display that utilizes the company’s gallium nitride (GaN) based LED technology.  Unlike the flat panel LED displays that are widely available, the CRVD™ display is a rear projection display.

According to the USPTO database, Ostendo owns 14 U.S. patents, including the ’430 patent, but only six of these U.S. patents appear deal with imaging technology.  Dr. Hussein El-Ghoroury, Ostendo’s CEO,  is listed as the sole inventor or co-inventor on all six of Ostendo’s imaging-based patents.  Ostendo’s other eight U.S. patents appear to deal with telecommunications unrelated to Ostendo’s current technology, and were obtained from Ellipsis Digital Systems, Inc., for which Dr. El-Ghoroury served as CEO, and was its most prolific inventor.

 
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Posted by on March 6, 2011 in illumination, imaging

 

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