CAO Group (CAO) is a Utah-based company that designs and sells a variety of dental, veterinary, forensic and lighting products including the Dynasty line of LED lamps.
CAO owns U.S. Patents Nos. 6,465,961 (’961 Patent), 6,634,770 (’770 Patent), and 6,746,885 (885 Patent), which relate to LED technology embodied by the Dynasty lamps.
Earlier this month CAO asserted the ’961, ’770 and ’885 Patents against a host of LED lamp makers. The patent infringement complaint (CAO_Complaint), filed in federal court in Utah, names as defendants GE Lighting, Osram Sylvania, Lighting Science Group, Nexxus Lighting, Sharp Electronics, Toshiba, Feit Electric Company, and Lights of America.
The asserted patents are directed to an LED light source (100) with a heat sink (104) that has multiple panels (104b-i). Each panel may host one or more LED chips (106), which can be arranged to transmit light in multiple directions.
The arrangement of panels (104b-i) can be varied to facilitate emission of light from the LED chips (106) based on the desired directions of light.
Figure 6 shows that the heat sink (403) may include a lining of thermal electric material (405) that lines an air chamber (406).
By applying a voltage to the thermal electric material (405), its temperature can be lowered and heat can be drawn from the heat sink material (403), which in turn draws heat away from the LED chips (402).
According to the asserted patents, this LED lamp structure efficiently dissipates the heat produced by the LEDs.
CAO’s complaint is the latest in the very hot area of LED patent infringement litigation and the third such suit filed in the last month (see my post about the Cree and Takion suits here).
Eric Lane is a patent attorney at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego and the author of Green Patent Blog. Mr. Lane can be reached at elane@luce.com.
