OPC UA Gateway Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
Filing growth compares 2021 (9 records) with 2024 (8) — 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 80 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the OPC UA gateway patent record actually shows
An OPC UA gateway sits at the junction between factory-floor protocols and IT-side data pipelines, translating machine data into a vendor-neutral address space. That translation function is exactly where patent claims cluster: the corpus in scope — 80 published records spanning 2015 to the 2026 cut-off — is dominated by transmission and protocol-mapping claims rather than control-loop claims. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so recent years understate real activity.
Filing has already passed its most visible peak: 2019 produced the highest count so far, and the 2021-2024 window shows a modest decline rather than acceleration. That pattern, combined with concentration among a handful of large industrial and technology filers, points to a field where the core gateway architecture is well staked out and later entrants are filing on narrower implementation details.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 80-record dataset: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claims.
Filing trend: a 2019 peak, then a gentle pull-back
Annual counts rise from 2 records in 2017 to a peak of 11 in 2019, then ease through the early 2020s; the -11% change measured from 9 records in 2021 to 8 in 2024 is the most recent complete-year comparison available. 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in as publications catch up to filing dates.
Technology composition: transmission claims dominate
H04L (digital information transmission) appears on 76.3% of all 80 records, far ahead of G05B control systems at 25.0%. Smaller shares in G06F, H04W, G06N, G01F, B01D and C07K show the gateway concept reaching into computing, wireless, AI-based and even measurement or materials contexts, but each of those remains a minority claim pattern rather than a parallel filing track.
Shares are the percentage of the 80 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Industrial IoT: OPC UA Gateway Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about industrial iot: opc ua gateway patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited records and a representative filing
EP3883214B1 — Method for implementing an industrial communication gateway
Filed by Mitsubishi Electric R&D Centre Europe and granted in 2023, this record describes a method for implementing an industrial communication gateway — the kind of claim structure typical of the mid-2020s wave, where the architecture is settled and the invention sits in implementation detail.Grant date and assignee are shown in the table; treat the abstract summary here as descriptive, not as a claim analysis.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20170163444A1 | Apparatus and method for using an internet of things edge secure gateway | 72 |
| 2 | US20180309831A1 | Internet of things pub-sub data publisher | 66 |
| 3 | CN109765866A | 一种基于OPC UA的工业网络系统及其数据处理方法 | 40 |
| 4 | US20200210869A1 | Gateway and method for transforming a description of an industrial process equipment into a data information … | 37 |
| 5 | CN105530240A | 多种工业协议向OPC UA地址空间自动映射的方法 | 27 |
| 6 | CN112688865A | 一种图形化在线建模的OPC UA网关的设计方法 | 25 |
| 7 | US20190068400A1 | Edge server and method of operating an edge server | 23 |
| 8 | WO2017186260A1 | Edge server and method of operating an edge server | 23 |
| 9 | US10178177B2 | Apparatus and method for using an internet of things edge secure gateway | 12 |
| 10 | US20160294617A1 | Method for configuring a web services gateway and web services gateway | 10 |
Citation counts reflect influence inside this searched corpus and skew toward older filings; treat them as a signal of prior-art density, not of which invention is currently most valuable.
Patent titles are shown in the language they were filed in, not translated, so that each record stays verifiable against the original filing — a translated title will not match in Eureka or in any national register. Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
Put your own technology through the same analysis
Eureka on the web
When you want the answer in the next five minutes.
The agent works the prompt against patents and technical literature, citing every source.
Run your analysis now →MCP server & REST API
When it has to run inside your own pipeline.
Patent search, landscape analysis and assignee resolution as MCP tools. Drop them into any agent framework, or call REST directly.
Browse MCP servers →What the data means for a filing or freedom-to-operate decision
Three figures from this dataset carry direct implications for anyone deciding whether, and where, to file next in OPC UA gateway technology.
The top of the field is crowded, the rest is thin
Five assignees hold 65.0% of the 80 records in scope, and the top 10 push that to 90.0%. That leaves little room in the core architecture claims; new entrants are more likely to find open ground in narrower implementation or integration claims than in the gateway concept itself.
Claims are won and lost on data transmission, not control logic
Three in four records carry an H04L classification against one in four for G05B control systems. Drafting a gateway patent as a control-system invention, rather than a transmission/protocol-mapping invention, is filing against the grain of where examiners and prior art actually sit.
A field past its filing peak, not one accelerating
Annual filings peaked at 11 in 2019 and the last complete comparison, 2021's 9 records against 2024's 8, shows an -11% pull-back. That is consistent with a technology whose core claim space is largely staked, not one where competitors are racing to file.
Co-filing is rare and concentrated in one relationship
Only three co-assignee pairs appear across the dataset, and the strongest link — between Mitsubishi Electric and its European R&D centre — accounts for four joint records. Most filers in this field patent alone rather than through joint ventures.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to industrial iot: opc ua gateway patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Where to take this analysis next
The dataset points to specific follow-up work depending on whether the goal is filing strategy, freedom-to-operate, or competitive tracking.
Map claim language against the H04L cluster
With 76.3% of records in digital transmission classes, a claim-by-claim read of that cluster in Eureka will show which protocol-mapping approaches are already blocked and which implementation variants remain open.
Explore the H04L cluster in EurekaTrack the concentrated leaders for new filings
With 90.0% of records held by the top 10 of 24 ranked assignees, setting alerts on that group in Eureka surfaces new filings before they broaden into adjacent IPC classes.
Set up assignee tracking in EurekaCheck the minority IPC branches for white space
Classes like G06N, G01F and B01D each cover a handful of records; running a focused prior-art search on those branches in Eureka can confirm whether they are genuinely open or simply under-indexed.
Search adjacent branches in EurekaCommon questions about OPC UA gateway patents
The ranked list covers 24 companies, with the leading assignee holding 12 of the 80 records in scope and the fifth-ranked holding 9. The top five combined account for 65.0% of all records, so filing activity is concentrated among a small group of large industrial and technology companies rather than spread evenly. That said, the list still runs to two dozen distinct filers, so it is not a single-company field.
Filing activity peaked at 11 records in 2019 and has eased since; the most recent complete-year comparison shows 9 records in 2021 falling to 8 in 2024, an -11% change. That is a gentle pull-back rather than a collapse, and because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025-2026 figures will rise as more filings become public. The field looks past its filing peak but still active on implementation detail.
H04L, the digital information transmission subclass, appears on 76.3% of the 80 records in scope, far ahead of G05B control and regulating systems at 25.0%. Smaller shares touch electric digital data processing, wireless communications, and AI-based computing. This means most inventions are framed around how data moves and gets mapped between protocols, not around control-loop logic.
The smaller IPC branches — G01F flow/level measurement, B01D separation processes, and C07K peptides/proteins — each cover only one or two of the 80 records, suggesting gateway concepts applied to those domains are lightly claimed so far. AI-based computing under G06N sits at 3.8% of records, also thin relative to the core transmission cluster. Any of these adjacent branches is worth a dedicated prior-art check before assuming the space is truly open, since a small count can also mean a niche with little commercial pull rather than an overlooked opportunity.
Rarely. The dataset identifies only three co-assignee pairs across all 80 records, and the strongest relationship, between Mitsubishi Electric and its European R&D centre, accounts for four joint records. The other pairs involve single joint filings. Most assignees in this field file independently rather than through joint development arrangements.
Research Industrial IoT: OPC UA Gateway Patent Landscape in depth with Eureka
Go past this page: query the whole industrial iot: opc ua gateway patent landscape corpus yourself, in your own scope.
Every answer comes back with patent numbers you can open.
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.