Angle of Arrival and Direction Finding Patents: Filing Trends and Who Holds the Ground
49.3% concentration. The top 5 assignees account for 17,499 of the 35,478 records in scope — nearly half the field sits with a handful of filers. Filings rose from 894 in 2017 to a peak of 2,479 in 2022. The 2021-to-2024 window — the last stretch not distorted by publication lag — shows filings essentially flat, 2,384 to 2,345, a -2% change. Counts for 2025 and 2026 are shown for completeness but will rise as later publications land; they should not be read as a decline.
- 1QUALCOMM INC28.1%
- 2HUAWEI TECH CO LTD6.4%
- 3SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO LTD6.1%
- 4TELEFONAKTIEBOLAGET LM ERICSSON (PUBL)4.7%
- 5LG ELECTRONICS INC4.1%
See the full angle of arrival and direction finding analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions on this landscape
Who holds the most patents in angle of arrival and direction finding?
The assignee ranking is led by a single company with 9,954 records, well ahead of the rest of the field — the fifth-place holder has 1,463 and the tenth 658. The top 5 assignees combined account for 49.3% of the 35,478 records in scope, and the top 10 reach 60.1%. That means roughly half the field's patent activity is concentrated among just five organisations, most of them large wireless-infrastructure and consumer-electronics companies rather than specialist direction-finding firms.
Is filing activity in angle of arrival technology still growing?
Filing rose from 894 records in 2017 to a peak of 2,479 in 2022, then held roughly flat through the last fully complete comparison year: 2,384 in 2021 versus 2,345 in 2024, a -2% change. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower still, but that reflects the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication rather than an actual drop-off. Treat the plateau since 2022 as the more reliable read than any apparent recent decline.
What patent classes cover angle of arrival and direction finding methods?
The largest single class is H04W (wireless communication networks), appearing in 30.1% of the 35,478 records in scope, followed by H04B transmission at 19.3%, H04L digital information transmission at 16.5% and G01S radar, sonar and positioning at 16.3%. Antenna-specific claims under H01Q sit much lower at 4.6%, and AI-model computing under G06N at 2.4%. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC classes, these shares add up to more than 100% and should not be treated as a breakdown of the whole field.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Angle of Arrival and Direction Finding covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.