The dataset ranks 100 assignees, and filing is concentrated at the top: the leading filer alone holds 404 of the 3,896 records in scope, and the top five combined hold 30.9% of all records. Below the tenth-ranked filer at 55 records, the field spreads into a long tail of companies with only a handful of filings each. This means competitive tracking is more useful when focused on the handful of dominant filers than spread evenly across the full ranking.

Filings peaked in 2022 at 236 and eased to 139 by 2024, a 29% decline over that three-year span. 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 sustained slowdown rather than a plateau after a filing surge. Anyone tracking momentum should watch the 2024-2025 window fill in over the next reporting cycle before drawing conclusions.

Semiconductor device claims under H01L appear in 44.3% of the 3,896 records, the single largest class, followed by material analysis and testing under G01N at 25.4% and general semiconductor devices under H10D at 19.2%. Because many records carry multiple IPC codes, these percentages overlap rather than sum to a whole, reflecting that most inventions pair a measurement method with a specific device application rather than claiming a standalone technique.

US11430647B2, assigned to Nova Measuring Instruments and published in 2022, claims a secondary ion mass spectrometry system built around a specific hardware chain: a sample stage, a primary ion beam, an extraction lens tuned for low extraction field, and a magnetic sector spectrograph combining an electrostatic analyzer with a magnetic sector analyzer. It blocks that particular instrument architecture, not SIMS-based junction profiling generally, so alternative ion-optics configurations or non-SIMS profiling methods sit outside its claims. A design-around review should focus specifically on the extraction-lens and spectrograph coupling described in the claims.

The clearest thinner areas relative to the core semiconductor and analytical classes are matrix-effect correction methods, reference-sample calibration standards, and techniques that correlate results across measurement platforms such as SIMS and spreading resistance profiling. These sit adjacent to the dense H01L and G01N core rather than inside it, meaning a claim drafted around cross-platform correlation or improved reference standards is less likely to run into the concentrated prior art held by the top filers.