Brushless Motors for Power Tools: Patents, Leaders and Where Filing Is Headed
Filing is concentrated but not locked up. the top 5 assignees hold 20.9% of all 2,672 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 30.5% — leaving most of the field to a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants. Filings ran from 98 in 2017 to a peak of 182 in 2020, then eased to 57 by 2024 — a 38% decline over the 2021-to-2024 span. 2025 and 2026 figures are shown for completeness but understate true filing activity given publication lag.
- 1ETHICON INC6.1%
- 2JTEKT CORP4.8%
- 3CILAG GMBH INTERNATIONAL4.0%
- 4BLACK & DECKER CORP3.3%
- 5LINEAR LABS2.8%
See the full brushless motors for power tools 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 on brushless motors for power tools?
One assignee leads the ranked field with 162 records, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 74 and the tenth-place holder at 40. The top 5 assignees combined account for 20.9% of all 2,672 records in scope, and the top 10 account for 30.5%, which means even the leading group leaves roughly seven in ten records held by a long tail of smaller filers. That tail includes entrants from adjacent fields such as surgical instruments, whose sensorless-control and motor-drive claims overlap directly with power tool applications.
Is brushless motor patent filing for power tools still growing?
Filing peaked at 182 records in 2020 and has since eased, with the 2021-to-2024 span showing a 38% decline from 92 to 57 records — the most recent years for which the trend can be read reliably. Counts for 2025 and 2026 appear lower still, but that reflects publication lag of roughly 18 months rather than a real drop in filing activity. A fair read is that volume has come off its 2020 high, not that the technology area is closing.
What technology areas dominate brushless motor patent claims?
Motor control electronics dominate: H02P (control of motors and generators) appears in 44.5% of the 2,672 records, more than double the 21.0% share held by H02K (electric motors and generators themselves). Protective circuit arrangements (H02H) and power conversion (H02M) also carry meaningful shares, pointing to dense claim activity around drive logic, protection and power electronics rather than pure motor construction. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC codes, these shares add up to more than 100% of the total record count and should not be summed as if they were mutually exclusive.
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 Brushless Motors for Power Tools 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.