Friday, September 26, 2008

MIT spinoffs see a spate of recent patent activity

Given the many MIT spinoffs and MIT innovations, MIT’s Technology Licensing Office is a patent success story in and of itself. So let’s take a look this month at a few MIT spinoff company patents issued within the last year or so that name New England inventors.

• AmberWave Systems Corp. of Salem, N.H., founded by MIT professor Eugene Fitzgerald, was established to exploit the advantages of “strained silicon” useful in semiconductor technology. AmberWave patent No. 7,410,861 (Aug. 12) discloses a new way to fabricate a transistor including strained silicon — a specially enhanced material with improved properties that allow semiconductor devices to operate at higher speeds and consume less power. This patent names as inventors Mayank Bulsara of Cambridge; Matthew Currie of Windham, N.H.; and Anthony Lochtefeld of Somerville.

• Akamai Technologies Inc. in Cambridge was formed based on Internet traffic-management technology developed at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. Akamai patent No. 7,406,627 (July 29) covers a way to test Internet content delivery networks. A real-world “traffic environment” is replicated so that bugs in the system can be eliminated before live deployment. The listed inventors include Daniel Stodolsky of Somerville.

• Alkermes Inc., also located in Cambridge, won patent No. 7,278,425 on Oct. 9, 2007, for a new inhaler for dry-powder medicine. The inhaler provides for a higher emitted dose that is consistently reproducible with a low standard deviation. In 1999, Alkermes acquired Advanced Inhalation Research Inc., a private company started in 1997 to develop pharmaceutical products based on pulmonary drug delivery technologies jointly created at MIT and Penn State University. The named inventors in the ‘425 patent include David Edwards (Boston), Colleen Conlon (Somerville), Kevin Stapleton (Boston), and Tim Coker (Merrimack, N.H.).

• Lyle Shirley of Boxborough invented a fringe generator for interferometric measurement systems which produces a more stable and reproducible fringe pattern of the incident laser beam. Shirley’s patent, No. 7,349,102 (March 25), is owned by Dimensional Photonics International Inc. of Wilmington, an MIT spinoff based on technology developed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.

• LEDs are characterized by light extraction (how much light is emitted compared with the amount of light generated), collimation, and azimuthal isotropy (or uniformity). Patent No. 7,391,059 (June 24) claims novelty in a new interface for such devices having a dielectric function that varies spatially according to a pattern which can influence the extraction efficiency, collimation, and/or isotropy of the light emitted by an LED. The named inventors include Alexei Erchak and Michael Lim both of Cambridge as well as Nikolay Nemchuck of North Andover. The ‘059 patent is assigned to Luminus Devices Inc., created by a group of MIT researchers in 2002.

• You’ve probably heard about “Clocky,” the robot-like alarm clock that jumps off your night stand if you hit the snooze button and runs around on the floor sounding the alarm until you drag yourself out of bed and shut it off. MIT patent No. 7,355,928 for this invention issued April 8 and names Gauri Nanda as the inventor.


 

Kirk Teska is an adjunct law professor at Suffolk University Law School, and is the managing partner of Iandiorio, Teska & Coleman, an intellectual property law firm in Waltham. His book “Patent Savvy for Managers” is available online and in most major bookstores. He can be reached at kirk@iandorio.com.