One assignee leads with 44,464 records, a scale well beyond fifth place at 12,766 and tenth at 5,495 records in the ranking. The top five assignees combine for 135,283 records, 36.9% of the 366,872 records in scope, and the top ten reach 47.5%. That leaves a long tail of smaller filers below a clearly dominant handful, so competitive analysis in this field should focus first on the leader's family claims rather than assume an evenly spread market.

Filings peaked at 1,061 in 2020 and have since fallen 32%, from 1,003 in 2021 to 686 in 2024, the last year that can be treated as complete. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in and should not be read as evidence of a further drop. The honest read is a cooling from a 2020 high, not a collapse in activity.

G11C, covering static and digital memories, is the clear leader at 4.6% of all 366,872 records, more than three times the share of the next largest class, H01L semiconductor devices at 1.4%. H10B memory device manufacture (1.3%), H10D general semiconductor devices (0.6%) and G06F data processing (0.6%) follow well behind. Smaller classes such as H10W and H10P sit under 1%, marking them as comparatively under-claimed relative to the core memory-cell classes.

US5436506A is a Samsung Electronics SRAM memory cell patent filed in 1995 that claims an access transistor gate structure formed from a layer separate from the word line, with paired gates linked across adjacent memory cells. It remains a reference point in the field's citation graph because later memory device patents build on or route around this specific gate-and-word-line layering approach. Anyone drafting new SRAM cell-layout claims should check this record's specific layer-separation limitation before assuming their design is clear of it.

The class data points to fabrication and process-integration branches — H10W and H10P — which carry a fraction of the record volume that G11C or H10B do, despite sitting adjacent to heavily claimed memory-cell and manufacture classes. Circuit-timing calibration and process-control feedback claims outside the core G11C cell-architecture space also show comparatively light density. None of this guarantees the space is unclaimed by non-patent prior art, but the IPC distribution is the first signal worth testing with a targeted freedom-to-operate search.