Constant-Current LED Driver Patents: Top Companies & Trends 2026
A data-backed look at constant-current LED driver patents: filing trends since 2017, the IPC composition across driver and lighting classes, assignee concentration, and where claim space remains open.
Filing growth = 2021 (14 records) → 2024 (4); 2024 is the last year we treat as complete. Top-5 share = the 5 largest assignees ÷ all 502 records in scope (CR5), not the ranked leaders only.
What the constant-current LED driver patent record shows
Constant-current LED driver patents sit at the intersection of lighting circuit design and power conversion: a driver has to hold current steady across a dimming range, a temperature swing, and often a mains-voltage variance, while fitting inside a fixture that keeps shrinking. The 502 records in scope span 2015 through the 2026 cut-off, filed almost entirely under H05B (electric heating and lighting circuits), with secondary claim activity in power conversion (H02M), lighting-device components (F21V) and display control (G09G). That spread says the core current-regulation circuit is the dominant claim target, and everything else — the fixture, the light source form factor, the display backlight application — is filed as a secondary layer on top of it.
Filing activity peaked in 2018 and has trended down since, though the two most recent years are still filling in as publications lag behind filing by roughly 18 months. Receiving-office data shows China well ahead of the United States, South Korea, Europe and the WIPO PCT route, which matters for anyone deciding where enforcement or freedom-to-operate risk actually concentrates.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 502-record set: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claim weight now.
Filing trend: a 2018 peak, then a real pullback
Filings ran at 31 in 2017, climbed to a peak of 37 in 2018, and by the last fully comparable window had dropped from 14 in 2021 to 4 in 2024 — a 71% fall over that three-year span. Treat 2025 and 2026 as undercounted rather than as evidence the field has gone quiet; publication lag alone would produce a similar-looking drop-off in any recent segment.
Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in. Growth rates on this page therefore end at 2024; running them to the last bar would understate the field.
IPC composition: one dominant class, several thinner adjacents
H05B appears in 99.0% of the 502 records, confirming that almost every filing touches the core lighting-circuit class regardless of its other claims. Below that, F21V (8.8%), F21Y (6.6%), F21S (5.8%), G09G (5.8%) and H02M (5.8%) each cover a modest slice, while H01L (4.0%) and B60Q (2.6%) are the thinnest — semiconductor-device integration and vehicle-lighting application are claimed far less often than the core circuit itself.
Shares are the percentage of the 502 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Constant-Current LED Driver Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about constant-current led driver patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative filing and most-cited prior art
US9622303B1 — Current mirror and constant-current LED driver system for constant-current LED driver IC device
Embodiments of a current mirror for a constant-current light-emitting diode (LED) driver system and a constant-current LED driver integrated circuit (IC) device having the current mirror are described. In one embodiment, a current mirror includes at least one current mirror cell. Each of the at least one current mirror cell includes semiconductor circuits configured to generate an output current based on a reference current and a control module configured to alternately and continuously charge the semiconductor circuits in response to non-overlapping clock signals.Filed by NXP B.V., published 2017-04-11. Claims a specific current-mirror-cell architecture using alternating, non-overlapping clock signals rather than the current-regulation concept broadly.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20100231136A1 | Line voltage dimmable constant current LED driver | 150 |
| 2 | US20110080111A1 | Configurable load control device for light-emitting diode light sources | 145 |
| 3 | US6980181B2 | LED drive circuit | 116 |
| 4 | US8492988B2 | Configurable load control device for light-emitting diode light sources | 103 |
| 5 | CN101668369A | 一种高效率恒流LED驱动器 | 97 |
| 6 | US20020105373A1 | LED drive circuit | 96 |
| 7 | CN102076138A | 一种市电输入LED恒流驱动器 | 91 |
| 8 | EP2315497A1 | An LED driver circuit having headroom/dropout voltage control and power factor correction | 81 |
| 9 | US7439945B1 | Light emitting diode driver circuit with high-speed pulse width modulated current control | 78 |
| 10 | US7042165B2 | Driver circuit for LED vehicle lamp | 73 |
Citation counts reward older filings that have had more time to accumulate citations inside this searched corpus — read them as a signal of influence on later filers, not as a ranking of current commercial importance.
Patent titles are shown in the language they were filed in, not translated, so that each record stays verifiable against the original filing — a translated title will not match in Eureka or in any national register. Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three read-outs from the same dataset, aimed at where to file, who to watch, and what claim space is still open.
No single company controls the core circuit
The ranked leader holds 16 records out of 502, and the combined top 5 account for just 11.8% of all records in scope. That is a long tail rather than a chokepoint: useful for a new entrant, because it means the current-regulation art is not locked up by one or two players, but it also means prior art is scattered across many small filers rather than concentrated where a single search would find it.
Volume has genuinely cooled, not just lagged
The drop from 14 filings in 2021 to 4 in 2024 is a comparison between two years both old enough to be considered complete, so it is a real decline rather than a publication-lag artefact. Combined with a 2018 peak of 37, the shape is a technology that filed heavily through the late 2010s and has since slowed — worth checking against your own roadmap before assuming this space is still accelerating.
The circuit class is universal; everything else is a layer
Almost every record in scope touches H05B, so differentiation happens in the secondary classes: power conversion (H02M, 5.8%), display control (G09G, 5.8%), or vehicle lighting (B60Q, 2.6%). A claim strategy that only targets the core circuit is filing into the most crowded part of the field; the thinner adjacents are where narrower, more defensible claims are still available.
China leads receiving-office volume by a wide margin
China accounts for the largest single share of receiving-office filings, with the United States and South Korea next. Anyone assessing freedom-to-operate risk should weight a China-first search accordingly, since a US-only or EP-only clearance search would miss most of the corpus.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to constant-current led driver patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
| Assignee | Co-assignee | Shared families |
|---|---|---|
| Inventronics (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. | YAO XIAOLI | 1 |
| Inventronics (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. | REN LIJUN | 1 |
| Inventronics (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. | HUA GUICHAO | 1 |
| Inventronics (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. | GE LIANGAN | 1 |
| Molex Incorporated | BLOUNT CHRISTOPHER | 1 |
Co-assignee pairing is rare in this dataset — five pairs total, the strongest tied to a single Chinese driver-IC filer working with individual named inventors. That points to a field where most patenting happens inside one organisation rather than through joint ventures or cross-licensing partnerships.
Where to take this analysis
The dataset behind this page can be queried further inside Patsnap Eureka for claim-level detail, freedom-to-operate checks, or a narrower slice by assignee or jurisdiction.
Check freedom-to-operate before filing
Run the current-mirror and dimming-control claim families against a specific driver topology to see which claims actually read on your design.
Explore in EurekaTrack the assignees still active post-2021
Filing volume dropped through 2024, but the ranked leaders did not all pull back equally — isolate which ones kept filing.
Explore in EurekaMap the thinner IPC adjacents
B60Q and H01L carry the least claim density in this set; a targeted search there can surface narrower, less contested filing room.
Explore in EurekaQuestions practitioners ask about this landscape
The assignee ranking covers 100 companies drawn from the 502 records in scope, and it is a genuine long tail rather than a small dominant group. The single ranked leader holds 16 records, and the combined top 5 account for only 11.8% of all 502 records, with the top 10 reaching 18.3%. That means no filer has cornered the core current-regulation art, so a freedom-to-operate search needs to look well beyond the largest few names to be reliable.
No — filing peaked at 37 in 2018 and has since declined, with the most recent fully comparable window showing a drop from 14 filings in 2021 to 4 in 2024, a 71% fall. The 2025 and 2026 figures in the raw trend look even lower, but that is expected: publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the newest years are always undercounted at the point of measurement. Treat the 2021-2024 comparison as the reliable read on direction, not the raw tail-end numbers.
H05B, covering electric heating and lighting circuits, appears in 99.0% of the 502 records and is effectively a universal class for this technology. Secondary classes carry the differentiating detail: F21V (lighting device components, 8.8%), G09G (display control circuits, 5.8%) and H02M (power conversion, 5.8%) are the next most common, while H01L (semiconductor devices, 4.0%) and B60Q (vehicle lighting, 2.6%) are the thinnest. A record can and often does carry several of these classes at once, so the shares add up to more than 100% of the record total.
Receiving-office data shows China well ahead with 234 filings, followed by the United States at 115, South Korea at 48, the EPO at 30, the WIPO PCT route at 21, and India at 13. This distribution should guide both offensive filing strategy and defensive clearance work — a search or filing programme that stops at the US and Europe would miss the majority of the documented activity in this field. Where you actually manufacture or sell matters more than where the largest corpus sits, but the corpus tells you where competitors and prior art concentrate.
US9622303B1, assigned to NXP B.V., claims a current-mirror architecture for a constant-current LED driver IC that uses at least one current-mirror cell with semiconductor circuits charged alternately by non-overlapping clock signals. It is narrow to that specific mirror-cell and clocking arrangement rather than to constant-current regulation in general, so it does not block every constant-current driver design — only implementations that use a comparably structured current-mirror cell with that non-overlapping clock scheme. Designs using different regulation topologies, such as those built around H02M-class power-conversion circuits or discrete analog feedback loops, sit outside its literal claim scope, though a design-around should still be checked claim-by-claim.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.