Fine Metal Mask Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
Fine Metal Mask Evaporation Patents: Who Holds the Ground and Where It's Open
49.5% concentration. The top five assignees alone account for 375 of the 758 records in scope — filing here is a small-group contest, not a fragmented field. Annual filings climbed from 67 in 2017 to a peak of 105 in 2019, then declined through the documented 2021-to-2024 window (98 to 45, -54%). Treat 2025 and 2026 figures as provisional given the usual 18-month publication lag rather than as evidence of a continued fall.
- 1LG DISPLAY CO LTD128
- 2SAMSUNG DISPLAY CO LTD82
- 3APPLIED MATERIALS INC61
- 4TGO TECH CORPORATION57
- 5BOE TECHNOLOGY GROUP CO LTD47
See the full fine metal mask evaporation 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 about fine metal mask evaporation patents
Who holds the most fine metal mask evaporation patents?
The dataset’s leading assignee holds 128 of the 758 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked filer at 47 and the tenth at 22. The top five assignees combined account for 49.5% of all records, and the top ten reach 67.8%, so filing activity is concentrated among a small group of large panel makers and equipment suppliers rather than spread evenly. A full ranking of 100 assignees sits behind this concentration, with a long tail of single-filing entrants below it.
Is fine metal mask patent filing activity slowing down?
Filings peaked at 105 in 2019 and fell to 45 by 2024, a documented -54% decline from the 2021 level of 98. That 2021-to-2024 window is the most recent period that can be read reliably, because patent publication typically lags filing by around 18 months. Figures for 2025 and 2026 will rise as later filings publish, so they should not yet be read as confirmation of a continued slowdown.
What technical problems do these patents actually address?
The search terms behind this dataset target the practical failure points of FMM evaporation: mask tension control, thermal expansion during high-temperature deposition, shadow effect at fine pixel pitch, mask cleaning between production runs, and alignment accuracy. These are tolerance and process-reliability problems rather than new-material claims, which is why coating and deposition classes like C23C and H10K carry the heaviest documented claim density.
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 Fine Metal Mask Evaporation 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.