Filing is concentrated: the leading assignee holds 21 of the 60 records in scope, and the top 5 of 14 ranked assignees together account for 83.3% of all records. This is a field dominated by a small group of foundry, device and materials companies rather than a fragmented one. Anyone entering fresh should expect to file adjacent to, not ahead of, that group’s existing claims.

Filing peaked in 2022 at 21 records and has eased since, with the 2021-to-2024 window showing a -50% change from 4 down to 2 records. However, 2025 and 2026 figures are still incomplete because publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so it is too early to call this a permanent decline rather than a normal pullback from a peak year. Revisiting the trend in a year or two will give a clearer read.

Buried power rail claims describe moving the power distribution network to the wafer’s backside to relieve IR drop and free frontside routing, and this is the dominant device-level claim type in the dataset, reflected in the strong H01L and H10W IPC shares. Nano-TSV claims cover the through-silicon-via structures needed to connect that backside rail to frontside transistors at fine pitch, and they show up as a technically specific but comparatively thinner sub-area. Distinguishing the two matters because a buried-rail claim without a corresponding via or contact scheme is often incomplete for manufacturability purposes.