The assignee ranking in this dataset is led by a single filer with 460 records, well ahead of fifth place at 138 and tenth place at 70. The five leading assignees together account for 40.9% of all 2,886 records in scope, meaning a large share of the field’s core claims sit with a small group of integrated device manufacturers and memory specialists. Anyone doing freedom-to-operate work should treat those five portfolios as the first checkpoint rather than searching the corpus at large.

Filings peaked at 290 in 2022 and had declined to 169 by 2024, a documented 39% drop from the 2021 level of 275. That is measured against 2024 as the last complete year in the dataset; 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in because publication typically lags filing by about 18 months. The honest read is a real pullback from a 2022 high, not a technology in decline, since process and integration challenges around the material remain active research areas.

Hafnium zirconium oxide is a thin-film dielectric that, in specific orthorhombic crystalline phases, exhibits ferroelectric switching compatible with standard CMOS deposition processes — unlike older ferroelectric materials such as lead-zirconate-titanate, which do not scale well below certain thicknesses. This scalability is why the search terms in this dataset centre on phase control, coercive field and thickness scaling: these are the specific technical levers filers are patenting to make the material commercially viable at advanced nodes.