Cemented Carbide Grade Development Patents: Top Filers & Trends 2026
- Concentrated at the top. the five most active filers together hold 51.4% of all 2,778 records in scope, and the top ten hold 73.7% — this is a field with a narrow set of gatekeepers.
- Filing has cooled from its 2019 peak. activity peaked at 98 records in 2019 and growth from 2021 to 2024 fell 34%, though 2025-2026 figures are still filling in as publications lag filing.
- Alloys and drilling dominate the technology mix. C22C alloy claims touch 45.8% of records and E21B drilling claims touch 35.9%, while grinding tools and general metalworking sit far behind at under 14%.
Filing growth compares 2021 (53 records) with 2024 (35) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 2,778 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
Cemented carbide grade development sits at the intersection of powder metallurgy and hard-material engineering: controlling carbide grain size, binder content, sintering routes such as sinter HIP, and the suppression of brittle eta phase to hit a target combination of hardness and transverse rupture strength. The 2,778 records in this dataset span alloys chemistry, powder metallurgy processing, coatings, and the drilling and cutting-tool applications that consume these grades.
Because grade development work is filed heavily as continuations and across multiple jurisdictions, the assignee ranking and technology shares below are read at the family and record level rather than as raw document counts, giving a fairer picture of who is actually active.
Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 2,778-record dataset: filing activity by year, and the IPC subclasses those records fall into. Because a single record can carry several IPC classes, the technology shares below add up to more than 100% of records.
Filing trend, 2017-2026
Filings rose to a peak of 98 records in 2019, then declined; the 2021-to-2024 span shows a 34% drop (53 to 35 records). The final one to two years are undercounted because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025-2026 should not be read as a genuine falloff yet.
Technology composition by IPC subclass
C22C (alloys) and E21B (earth and rock drilling) are the two largest classes, present in 45.8% and 35.9% of records respectively. Powder metallurgy (B22F) touches a third of records, while coating, turning, ceramics, grinding and general metalworking classes each cover a smaller, more specialised slice.
Shares are the percentage of the 2,778 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Cemented Carbide Grade Development with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about cemented carbide grade development and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited prior art and a recent representative filing
Polycrystalline diamond compacts including a cemented carbide substrate and applications therefor (US12553292B1)
The filing covers a polycrystalline diamond compact bonded to a fine-grained cemented tungsten carbide substrate, where the substrate's cobalt-cemented tungsten carbide grains average about 1.5 micrometres or less, paired with a diamond table having an upper region and a lower region whose average grain sizes differ by at least a factor of two.Filed by US Synthetic Corporation, published 2026-02-17.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US4224380A | Temperature resistant abrasive compact and method for making same | 879 |
| 2 | US4604106A | Composite polycrystalline diamond compact | 779 |
| 3 | US5127923A | Composite abrasive compact having high thermal stability | 707 |
| 4 | US20080179104A1 | Nano-reinforced WC-co for improved properties | 616 |
| 5 | US5120327A | Cutting composite formed of cemented carbide substrate and diamond layer | 598 |
| 6 | US4694918A | Rock bit with diamond tip inserts | 554 |
| 7 | US5154245A | Diamond rock tools for percussive and rotary crushing rock drilling | 513 |
| 8 | US20010016273A1 | Multilayer CVD coated article and process for producing same | 418 |
| 9 | US4610931A | Preferentially binder enriched cemented carbide bodies and method of manufacture | 351 |
| 10 | US4288248A | Temperature resistant abrasive compact and method for making same | 324 |
Citation counts favour older documents simply because they have had longer to accumulate citations inside this corpus; treat them as a signal of influence on the field, not of current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three patterns stand out once the filing trend, technology mix and assignee concentration are read together.
A small group of filers sets the terms
With the top five assignees alone accounting for 51.4% of all records, freedom-to-operate work in core grade chemistry and processing routes has to start with those portfolios, not a broad landscape search.
Growth has slowed from the 2019 peak
Filings peaked at 98 records in 2019 and the 2021-2024 window shows a 34% decline; this reads as a maturing claim space rather than a shrinking one, since 2025-2026 counts are still incomplete.
Drilling applications shape a large share of grade claims
E21B (earth and rock drilling) sits second only to C22C alloys in the technology mix, meaning much of the grade development activity here is driven by downhole tool requirements rather than general cutting-tool use.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to cemented carbide grade development, with the prior art for and against each one.
Assignee landscape and where activity is thin
The ranking covers 100 companies counted by records, drawn from the full 2,778-record dataset. Filing is concentrated among a handful of established tooling, drilling and superabrasives groups, with a long tail of smaller filers behind them.
The top filer holds a wide margin
The leading assignee's 396 records sit well above the fifth-place total of 219, underscoring how much of the field's institutional knowledge sits with one organisation.
The drop-off past the top ten is steep
Tenth place holds 98 records, less than a quarter of the leader's count, which is where the field shifts from a small group of repeat filers to a much larger set of occasional ones.
Filing partnerships cluster around a few groups
Only ten co-assignee pairs appear in the data, and the strongest of them link entities within the same corporate family, suggesting internal group filing rather than broad industry co-development.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Sandvik Mining and Construction Tools AB | 1 | -88% |
| Smith International, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Kennametal Inc. | 0 | — |
| Sandvik Intellectual Property AB | 0 | — |
| Element Six (UK) Ltd | 0 | -100% |
| Element Six Abrasives | 0 | — |
| Sandvik Coromant | 0 | -100% |
| TDY Industries, LLC | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The landscape points to a mature, concentrated core with narrower openings at the edges. These are the natural next steps for a team acting on it.
Map freedom-to-operate against the top filers
With 73.7% of records held by ten assignees, an FTO review for any new grade chemistry or sintering route should start with those portfolios before widening the search.
Explore assignee portfolios in EurekaTrack the under-claimed branches
Gradient-structure and sinter-HIP process claims show thinner density than the core alloy and drilling classes, which is where a first-filer advantage is still available.
Run a white-space search in EurekaWatch for the 2025-2026 filing correction
Because publication lags filing by about 18 months, the apparent 2025-2026 slowdown will revise upward; re-check the trend once later filings publish.
Set a monitoring alert in EurekaCommon questions on cemented carbide grade patents
Filing in this space is concentrated: the leading assignee holds 396 records, well ahead of the fifth-place filer at 219 and the tenth-place filer at 98. Together the top five assignees account for 51.4% of all 2,778 records in scope, and the top ten account for 73.7%. That means a small group of tooling, drilling and superabrasives companies controls most of the documented grade chemistry and processing claims, so competitive monitoring should focus there first rather than across the full 100-company ranking.
Filing peaked at 98 records in 2019 and has since declined; the most recent complete comparison, 2021 to 2024, shows a 34% drop from 53 to 35 records. This looks more like a maturing claim space than a collapsing one, since heavy early filing tends to occupy the obvious grade compositions and processing windows first. The 2025 and 2026 figures in the dataset are still incomplete because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so they should not yet be read as continued decline.
C22C (alloys) is the largest single classification, appearing in 45.8% of the 2,778 records, followed by E21B (earth and rock drilling) at 35.9% and B22F (powder metallurgy) at 33.3%. Coating and surface deposition, turning and boring, ceramics, and grinding tools each cover smaller but still meaningful shares. Because records often carry multiple IPC classes, these figures overlap rather than sum to 100%, reflecting how grade development claims typically span alloy chemistry, processing and end-use application together.
US12553292B1, assigned to US Synthetic Corporation and published 2026-02-17, covers a polycrystalline diamond compact bonded to a fine-grained cemented tungsten carbide substrate with an average grain size of about 1.5 micrometres or less, paired with a diamond table split into an upper and lower region where the lower region's grains average at least twice the size of the upper region's. It is a specific combination of substrate grain size and diamond-table gradient structure, not a general claim over cemented carbide substrates, so its blocking effect is narrower than the compact-and-substrate concept as a whole.
Relative to the dense filing around core alloy chemistry (C22C) and drilling applications (E21B), branches such as gradient binder-content structures, sinter-HIP cycle parameters aimed specifically at eta-phase suppression, and general metalworking adaptations (B23P, 7.1% of records) show comparatively thinner claim density. These are not unclaimed, but they carry far fewer records than the core classes, which makes them worth a targeted prior-art search before committing R&D or filing budget to them.
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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.
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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.