US 7,358,929 · Granted 2008-04-15
The LED Tile Patent That Turned Floors Into Glowing Displays
Imagine floor tiles, wall panels, or ceiling squares that glow from the inside with LED lights arranged in grids or along edges. This patent covers a system where you can stack these tiles together to light up any surface—and control them so they all glow in sync or create animated light shows across a whole room.
The plain-English version
What it protects
The patent covers a tile structure where LEDs are placed inside the tile's interior space (either in a grid pattern or around the edges) and covered with a light-diffusing panel to spread the glow evenly. What's protected is the ability to combine multiple tiles together to cover floors, ceilings, walls, or building exteriors, and to control the lighting of those tiles individually or as coordinated groups to create various visual effects.
Why it matters
This patent, granted to Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions in 2008, represents an early key innovation in turning architectural surfaces into programmable light displays. By making tiles that could be networked and controlled together, it opened the door to smart lighting installations in homes, offices, and commercial spaces—shifting lighting from a purely functional role to an interactive design element.
Real-world use
Walk into a modern nightclub, hotel lobby, or high-end retail store and you might see the floor or ceiling glowing with coordinated colored light patterns that shift and pulse—that's this tile lighting system at work.
Original USPTO abstract
A tile lighting system is provided in which an interior space of a tile is lit by LEDs, such as in a grid or edge-lit formation, and a light diffusing panel is disposed over the interior space. The tile lighting system can be combined with others to tile any surface, such as a floor, ceiling, wall, or building exterior. Lighting control signals can be supplied to generate a wide range of effects on the tile lighting units, including effects coordinated among different tile lighting units. Two- and three-dimensional embodiments are contemplated.
Patent details
- Publication number
- US 7,358,929
- Filing date
- 2004-04-21
- Grant date
- 2008-04-15
- Assignee
- Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions, Inc.
- Inventor(s)
- MUELLER GEORGE G., LYS IHOR A., MORGAN FREDERICK M., PIEPGRAS COLIN, ROBERGE BRIAN, KIM HERN, DOWLING KEVIN J., LOGAN DEREK, CELLA CHARLES H.
- CPC class
- F21V33/006
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