Electrostatic surface haptics, also called electrovibration, creates the sensation of texture or friction on a flat touchscreen by modulating the electrostatic attraction between a finger and the screen surface, using voltage applied to a conductive or capacitive layer. It has no moving parts, unlike vibrotactile actuators that physically shake a device or surface. This distinction matters for patent drafting because electrostatic approaches are claimed around signal generation and timing circuitry, while vibrotactile approaches are claimed around mechanical actuator design. In this dataset, the dominance of the G06F digital-processing class (86.0% of 300 records) reflects that signal-centric framing.

The ranking covers 69 companies, and it is heavily front-loaded: the leading assignee alone holds 127 of the 300 records in scope, and the top five combined hold 178 records, or 59.3% of the total. The top ten extend that to 68.7%. Beyond that point the ranking thins quickly into a long tail of companies holding only a handful of records each, which is typical of a field with a few early, heavily-filing entrants and many smaller or one-off contributors.

Filing peaked in 2017 at 47 records and has not returned to that level since. Looking only at years that can be treated as complete, annual filings fell from 8 in 2021 to 4 in 2024, a 50% decline over that span. Figures for 2025 and 2026 are still incomplete because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so those years should not yet be read as confirming a continued slowdown.

The clearest signal is the gap between the dominant G06F signal-processing class, present on 86.0% of the 300 records, and the thinner hardware-adjacent classes: H10N at 9.0%, H01L at 4.3%, and G01L (force and pressure measurement) at 3.7%. That gap suggests claim space around the physical electrode layer, dielectric stack, or integrated force-sensing hardware is less crowded than claims on drive-signal generation and timing, which is where most existing filings concentrate.

US20190332173A1 claims a mobile touchscreen device that electrovibrates a portion of its surface to render the current time as a tactile shape, filed by an individual inventor and published in 2019. Its scope is narrow: it covers the specific application of using electrovibration to communicate time by touch, not the underlying electrovibration mechanism itself, which is disclosed in earlier, more heavily-cited foundational records. Anyone building a different application on top of electrovibration hardware would need to check this filing only if their use case also involves rendering time or similar discrete shapes tactilely, rather than treating it as a blocking reference for electrovibration generally.