Patents: Lights With a Chip but No Bulbs

January 31, 2000

PATENTS

Lights With a Chip but No Bulbs

By TERESA RIORDAN

ove over, Thomas Edison. George Mueller and Ihor Lys have seen the future of lighting, and it has nothing to do with light bulbs.
Mueller, 29, and Lys, 30, this month received a patent for a digital lighting technology that they contend may ultimately replace the conventional lighting that's been around in one form or another -- from incandescent to halogen -- for over a century.

Color Kinetics makes computer-controlled lights that change color.

Their fledgling Boston-based company, Color Kinetics, which just received $13 million in financing from investors that include Deutsche Bank, imagines that one day ordinary houses will be equipped with digital lighting. Such illumination might instantly change the hue of a wall, from muted eggshell to splashy pigments throbbing chromatically to the beat of Beck or Bach or whatever music happens to be playing.
The technology is based on light-emitting diodes -- or LEDs, those tiny little lights that have been around since the 1960s as indicators on electronic circuits and stereos. Essentially, the inventors have bunched many diodes together for a new type of color lighting.
"The LEDs are very very small and you can package them into any conceivable two-dimensional shape," said Kevin Dowling, Color Kinetics' director of engineering.
LEDs are semiconductor devices that light up when an electrical current passes through them. They have become brighter and brighter over the last 10 years, according to Dowling.
And even more important for Mueller and Lys, in the mid-1990s a Japanese inventor figured out how to make a blue LED -- thus completing the elemental light palette of reds, greens and blues that, when mixed together in different intensities, yields nearly any color of light that the human eye can detect.
The new patent covers microprocessor-controlled LEDs used for lighting and display purposes. Examples can be viewed at the company's Web site, http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/01/biztech/articles/31pate.html#1.
The approach is very different from the traditional method of creating colored light, which is to put a filter or gel in front of a white-light source so that only certain colors of the spectrum shine through.
While the patent was pending, Color Kinetics had already been selling products. Its lighting is used primarily for commercial purposes, such as large displays in department stores. But Mueller, who is the company's chief executive, contends that the technology enables "virtually unlimited applications" far beyond the products that the company currently sells.
The company cites other advantages to its LED lights. For one thing, they emit no ultraviolet light, so they will not fade fabrics or artwork. And LEDs are a a very low-temperature light source, so they won't burn the skin if touched.
So how many people does it take to change a Color Kinetics light fixture? None, according to the company -- at least for 11 years. That is how long Color Kinetics contends that it takes the LEDs to burn out -- and then only if they have been running continuously 24 hours a day.
Mueller and Lys received patent 6,016,038, which was assigned to Color Kinetics.

A Light-Emitting Chip for Small Computers

artin Lepselter has patented a self-illuminating semiconductor chip -- a breakthrough that he contends could be used to manufacture laptop computers that sell for as little as $100.
"People forever have been trying to get light out of silicon, but they've only been able to get minuscule amounts of light," said Lepselter, who holds 55 patents and is a former director of the semiconductor division at AT&T/Bell Labs.
He managed to do so, he said, by inserting more than a million miniature fluorescent tubes, each grouped into triads of red, green and blue, with each triad acting like a tiny color pixel.
"It's like a myriad of microscopic fluorescent bulbs that shine out through the cover of a chip's package," Lepselter said.
Unlike a liquid crystal display, or LCD, Lepselter's invention is a plasma display -- albeit a miniature one that relies on a technology very different from the plasma displays already found in large flat-panel screens. Plasma displays require no independent source of lighting.
As a result, according to Lepselter, his technology could be used to build a laptop computer that consists of little more than a keyboard and an eye piece that resembles those found on stereopticons -- those old-fashioned viewers that create a 3-D illusion with stereo images of a photograph.
When the computer user leans into the eye piece, "he will see the equivalent of a large screen because the eye becomes part of the optical circuit," Lepselter said.
"There are other tiny little displays in existence, most of them using LCDs," Lepselter said. "But nobody has made a small plasma display."
The same technology could be used for many inexpensive electronic devices, from video conferencing devices to virtual reality eyepieces, according to Lepselter.
He received patent 5,990,620, which he plans to license through his company, BTL Fellows, Inc., based in Summit, N.J.

Patents may be viewed on the Web at www.uspto.gov or may be ordered through the mail, by patent number, for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, DC 20231.

Related Sites
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http://www.colorkinetics.com/

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