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Run your analysis now →https://www.patsnap.com/resources/blog/rd-blog/hardware-enclave-architectures-patent-landscape/ · Patsnap · data cut-off 2026-07-31 · downloaded from the live page
Patent Landscape · Trusted Execution EnvironmentsHardware Enclave Architecture Patents: Filing Trends and Who Holds the Claim Space
- 58.7% concentration. The top five assignees alone account for 2,261 of the 3,851 records in scope — a field where claim space near the core enclave and attestation mechanisms is already crowded.
- Filings cooled after a 2021 peak. Published filings ran from 612 in 2021 to 219 in 2024, a 64% drop over that span — though 2025-2026 figures are still filling in given typical publication lag.
- G06F and H04L dominate the class mix. 72.7% of records touch electric digital data processing and 48.0% touch digital information transmission, showing enclaves are claimed mainly as compute and networking inventions, not as standalone hardware.
3,851
Published Records
59%
Top-5 Share of All Records
-64%
Filing Growth 2021→2024
US
Leading Jurisdiction
Filing growth compares 2021 (612 records) with 2024 (219) — 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 3,851 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
Published byPatsnap Research··7 min readSourced from Patsnap Eureka
Overview
What this patent landscape covers
Hardware enclave architectures cover the mechanisms — memory encryption engines, attestation reports, trusted computing base minimisation and hypervisor trust boundaries — that let a workload run with confidentiality guarantees even when the host operating system or hypervisor is not trusted. This search pulls 3,851 published records from 2015 through the 2026-07-31 cut-off that combine trusted execution environment or secure enclave language with these supporting mechanisms.
The scope spans silicon vendors defining the enclave primitive itself, cloud and virtualization vendors building attestation and confidential-VM tooling on top of it, and application-layer filers — payments, blockchain, identity — claiming enclave use rather than enclave construction. That mix explains why the technology composition below leans so heavily on general compute and networking classes rather than a narrow hardware-only subclass.
Filing activity and technology composition, 2015-2026
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Assignee ranking and totals. Derived from a Patsnap search on Hardware Enclave Architectures covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
The Data
Filing trend and technology composition
Publication counts by year and IPC subclass, drawn from the full 3,851-record set in scope for this search.
Filings rose to a 2021 peak, then declined
Published filings moved from 285 in 2017 to a peak of 612 in 2021, then fell to 219 by 2024 — a 64% decline across that three-year window. 2025 and 2026 figures (38 published so far in 2026) will rise as later filings publish; treat the last two years as incomplete rather than as evidence of a continued drop.
Compute and transmission classes dominate
G06F (electric digital data processing) appears on 72.7% of the 3,851 records and H04L (digital information transmission) on 48.0%, confirming enclaves are filed predominantly as software/system inventions. G06Q (business/commerce processing, 12.2%) reflects the payments and blockchain application layer; AI-adjacent classes G06N (3.5%) and G06V (1.6%) remain comparatively small, marking where enclave-plus-AI claims are still sparse.
Shares are the percentage of the 3,851 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Hardware Enclave Architectures covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.
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Representative and most-cited filings
Representative filing
System and method for remote attestation in trusted execution environment creation using virtualization technology (US20210397698A1)
VMWARE LLC
The filing describes a virtual secure enclave running inside a virtualized environment, using a trusted bootloader appliance to provision a TEE virtual computing instance for a requesting software process. Remote attestation happens in two stages: a hardware platform attests the trusted bootloader appliance first, then a second-stage attestation covers the provisioned enclave itself.Assignee: VMware LLC · Published 2021-12-23
Most-cited records in this dataset
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20210144517A1 | Multi-entity resource, security, and service management in edge computing deployments | 840 |
| 2 | US20170352027A1 | Authenticated data feed for blockchains | 338 |
| 3 | US20150319160A1 | Secure Management of Operations on Protected Virtual Machines | 295 |
| 4 | US20120023568A1 | Method and Apparatus for Trusted Federated Identity Management and Data Access Authorization | 225 |
| 5 | US20210117249A1 | Infrastructure processing unit | 222 |
| 6 | US20190156301A1 | Real-time cryptocurrency exchange using trusted hardware | 191 |
| 7 | US20130031374A1 | Firmware-based trusted platform module for arm processor architectures and trustzone security extensions | 189 |
| 8 | US20200084202A1 | Attestation token sharing in edge computing environments | 186 |
| 9 | US20170230179A1 | Password triggered trusted encrytpion key deletion | 186 |
| 10 | US20190095879A1 | Blockchain payment channels with trusted execution environments | 178 |
Citation counts favour older, foundational filings within this searched corpus and should be read as a signal of influence rather than current commercial weight.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Citation counts and representative records. Derived from a Patsnap search on Hardware Enclave Architectures covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
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What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three patterns stand out once concentration, trend and class composition are read together.
Concentration
58.7%
of 3,851 records held by top 5 assignees
The core enclave mechanism is largely spoken for
With the top five assignees combined holding 58.7% of all 3,851 records and the top ten holding 72.1%, new entrants attempting to claim the base attestation or memory-encryption mechanism are filing into dense prior art held by a small number of incumbents.
Top 10 combined: 2,776 records, 72.1% of scope
Filing momentum
-64%
2021 to 2024 published filings
Peak filing activity has passed, for now
Published filings fell from 612 in 2021 to 219 in 2024. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, 2025-2026 counts are still incomplete, but the multi-year decline through the last complete year is a real signal that the core primitive is maturing rather than still being staked out.
2017: 285 → 2021 peak: 612 → 2024: 219
Technology mix
72.7%
of records classed under G06F
Enclaves are claimed as system inventions, not standalone chips
G06F and H04L together dominate the class mix, while AI-related classes G06N (3.5%) and G06V (1.6%) stay thin. That gap suggests enclave claims tied to on-device model inference or confidential AI workloads are comparatively undercrowded relative to the core TEE mechanism.
G06N: 136 records · G06V: 61 records
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Looking for what nobody has claimed yet?
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to hardware enclave architectures, with the prior art for and against each one.
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Co-assignee relationships and derived observations. Derived from a Patsnap search on Hardware Enclave Architectures covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
Players
Who is filing, and where the field is still open
The assignee ranking covers 100 companies counted by record volume; it is the full ranking the data endpoint returns, not a curated top list.
Leader
1,114
records
One assignee sets the pace by a wide margin
The leading assignee holds 1,114 records, well ahead of the fifth-ranked filer at 183 — a gap that signals a company defining the enclave primitive at the silicon and platform level rather than filing opportunistically.
Fifth place: 183 records · Tenth place: 44 records
Recent momentum
-89% YoY
leading assignee, latest year
Filing pace has cooled across the ranked leaders
Momentum figures for the most recent year show sharp year-on-year declines across several major filers, consistent with the post-2021 published-filing decline rather than a single company retreating from the space.
Multiple leaders show 0 published filings in the latest year
Co-filing
75
shared records, strongest pair
Inventor collaboration clusters around a small team
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear in this dataset, and the strongest pairing shares 75 records — evidence that most of the field files under a single corporate assignee rather than through joint ventures or cross-company research pacts.
Strongest pairs share overlapping inventor teams
Year-on-year filing momentum by assignee
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Intel Corporation | 3 | -89% |
| Alipay (Hangzhou) Digital Service Technology Co., Ltd. | 1 | -67% |
| Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. | 1 | -83% |
| Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC | 0 | -100% |
| Alibaba Group Holding Limited | 0 | — |
| McAfee, LLC | 0 | -100% |
| Advanced New Technologies Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| GUIM BERNAT FRANCESC | 0 | — |
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Assignee-level momentum. Derived from a Patsnap search on Hardware Enclave Architectures covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
What's Next
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to specific next steps depending on whether the goal is freedom-to-operate, whitespace filing, or competitive monitoring.
Check freedom-to-operate against the leader's portfolio
With one assignee holding 1,114 records and the top five covering 58.7% of the field, any core-mechanism filing should be checked against those portfolios before drafting claims.
Run a freedom-to-operate search in EurekaScope claims toward under-claimed branches
Confidential AI inference and edge attestation show thinner class representation than the core TEE mechanism, making them plausible targets for narrower, defensible claims.
Explore whitespace mapping in EurekaTrack momentum shifts among ranked assignees
Sharp year-on-year declines among several leading filers suggest the competitive map is shifting; a monitoring watch on the ranked leaders will catch new entrants earlier than annual review.
Set up assignee monitoring in EurekaSource: Patsnap Eureka. Forward-looking reading of the same dataset. Derived from a Patsnap search on Hardware Enclave Architectures covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
FAQ
Common questions about hardware enclave patents
One assignee leads the ranked field with 1,114 of the 3,851 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-placed filer at 183 records. The top five assignees combined hold 58.7% of all records, and the top ten hold 72.1%, so the field is concentrated among a small number of silicon and platform vendors rather than spread evenly. Application-layer filers in payments and blockchain also appear in the ranking but hold materially smaller shares than the platform leaders.
Published filings peaked at 612 in 2021 and had fallen to 219 by 2024, a 64% decline over that span. Because patent publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the lower counts shown for 2025 and 2026 are still incomplete and should not be read as continued decline. Taken together, the trend through the last complete year points to a maturing core mechanism rather than an actively expanding land grab.
Electric digital data processing (G06F) appears on 72.7% of the 3,851 records in scope, and digital information transmission (H04L) appears on 48.0%, reflecting that most filings claim enclaves as system or networking inventions rather than as discrete hardware. Business and commerce data processing (G06Q) shows up on 12.2% of records, largely from payments and blockchain applicants building on top of enclave primitives. AI-related classes remain comparatively small, which is one indicator of where newer claim activity might still land.
The class composition shows AI-adjacent categories such as G06N (3.5% of records) and G06V (1.6%) are thin compared with the dominant G06F and H04L classes, suggesting enclave claims tied to on-device model inference or confidential AI workloads are less crowded. Speech and audio processing (G10L, 1.2%) and image data processing (G06T, 1.2%) show similarly light coverage. These are not guarantees of a clear path, but they are areas where the core enclave mechanism has not yet been heavily re-claimed for newer workload types.
US20210397698A1, assigned to VMware LLC and published 2021-12-23, describes a two-stage remote attestation scheme for a virtual secure enclave: a hardware platform first attests a trusted bootloader appliance, which then manages provisioning and a second attestation stage for the enclave instance itself. It matters because it sits squarely in the virtualized-TEE and attestation space that many later filings build on, making it a useful reference point for freedom-to-operate review on any nested or virtualized attestation flow. It is one of several representative filings in this dataset rather than the single most-cited record.
Answers are grounded in the same dataset. Derived from a Patsnap search on Hardware Enclave Architectures covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
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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.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
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.