Introducing a New Feature: Compare Assignees

If you’ve ever wondered how the patent strategies of two companies differ (for example, Intel vs. Micron), then the new Compare Assignees Tool will interest you. It summarizes the most critical Patent Title keywords used by the two companies, which helps to tell you where each company is heading (on their own), and highlights how their approach differs.

Filed Patents

The first chart compares the total patent filings by the two companies. This makes it intuitive to see a companies investment in their patent portfolio, and more importantly their consistency over time. In this case, we can see that Intel generally files more patents than Micron… especially between 2010 and 2019.

Note: Data for the most recent 18 months is incomplete because the USPTO holds this confidentially. The first time we can see complete data from 2020 will be July 1st, 2022.

Granted Patents

More critical than patent filings is the history of Granted Patents. Is a company successful at growing it’s patent portfolio and how fast are they growing it? Is the trend improving?

Top 50 Title Keywords

The following chart summarizes all of the patent titles filed by the assignees as a window into their areas of strategic focus.

Spikes: We can start by looking at the spikes, for example the word ‘memory’,
which indicates Micron is filing patents in this subject area 5x more frequently than
Intel.

Overlap: Both companies are filing patents with titles containing the words device,
semiconductor, apparatuses, operation, memory, integrated, die, control, multiple,
structure, transistor, dynamic, circuit, power, management, architecture, network,
and access.

Keywords Unique to Intel: It looks like Intel is the only one interested in patents
with the words embedded (probably ‘embedded systems’), thermal, substrate,
neural, and learning (probably ‘machine learning’)

Keywords Unique to Micron:  In contrast, it looks like Micron is the only one interested in correction, vehicle, cache, and voltage. Perhaps this points to an organization’s interest in: 

• error correction
• products targeted at vehicles
• improvements in caching
• power efficiency

Top CPC Codes

The Compare Assignees page summarizes the patent titles filed using the CPC Code. While some of these will be intuitive (i.e. Intel and Micron are interested in Semiconductors), the long tail data can point to interesting new pioneer patents. 

For example, Intel filing 6x as many patents as Micron in Pictorial Communication than Micron.

Up Next

We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief introduction to the Compare Assignees tool. We’ll be working on new charts and features over the next few weeks, and we’d love to get your feedback on the tool at IDiyas Suggestions.