Merging Unit Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- 38.3% concentration. The top 5 assignees hold 167 of 436 records in scope — filing here means competing directly with a small set of grid and electronics incumbents, not a fragmented field.
- Filing has cooled since 2019. Activity peaked at 32 records in 2019 and had fallen to 1 by 2026 (partial year), with the 2022 midpoint at 13 — a flat-to-declining trend, not a growth curve.
- Measurement dominates the claim space. G01R (electric & magnetic measurement) appears in 41.1% of the 436 records, more than double the next largest class, H02J at 24.3%.
What this landscape covers
Merging units and non-conventional instrument transformers sit at the point where analogue current and voltage sensing meets digitised substation communication. This dataset scopes to 436 published records filed between 2015 and mid-2026 that combine merging-unit or optical/non-conventional transformer terminology in the title with claim language around accuracy class, latency, redundancy, immunity, calibration or long-term drift — the operational guarantees that separate a lab prototype from a grid-deployable device.
Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 counts in this dataset understate real filing activity; treat the decline from the 2019 peak as directionally real but not yet fully settled at the tail end.
Let an AI agent run this analysis on your own technology
Pick a task. Every answer cites the patents behind it.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 436 records: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claim density.
A 2019 peak followed by a steady decline
Filings rose to 32 in 2019, then eased back toward the 2022 midpoint of 13 and continued down to 1 by 2026 (a partial year). Read the recent years as under-counted rather than as a hard stop — publication lag means 2025-2026 filings are still arriving.
Measurement and power-supply classes carry the weight
G01R (electric & magnetic measurement) touches 41.1% of the 436 records and H02J (power supply & grid systems) 24.3%, together framing this as primarily a sensing-and-power-delivery problem. H02H (protective circuits, 13.8%), G06F (digital data processing, 7.6%) and H04N (pictorial communication, 7.3%) show smaller but active adjacent claim clusters; because records can carry multiple classes these shares sum past 100%.
Shares are the percentage of the 436 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Merging Units and Non-Conventional Instrument Transformers with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about merging units and non-conventional instrument transformers and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited records and a representative filing
US11420575B2 — Power supply and a method for supplying power
A power supply for an energy management and monitoring unit includes a line arrangement with multiple lines representing inputs or outputs, each of which has at least one power line for supplying power. A merging unit combines the power lines of the line arrangement to a total voltage, and a splitting unit is configured to split the total voltage into at least two redundant voltages provided for the energy management and monitoring unit.Filed by Knorr-Bremse Systeme fuer Nutzfahrzeuge GmbH, granted 2022-08-23 — notable for framing the merging unit as a power-domain component (voltage combining and redundant splitting) rather than purely a data-domain one.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20200309829A1 | On-line monitoring system for the performance of the measurement equipment in the entire power grid based on … | 107 |
| 2 | US20100153036A1 | Power metering and merging unit capabilities in a single ied | 90 |
| 3 | CN101413995A | 一种电子式电流互感器校验装置 | 58 |
| 4 | US20180088643A1 | Intelligent power server applied to protection and control system for intelligent substation | 48 |
| 5 | CN102073029A | 电子式互感器测试系统及测试方法 | 47 |
| 6 | US8560255B2 | Power metering and merging unit capabilities in a single IED | 38 |
| 7 | CN103487780A | 一种GIS电子互感器测试系统及其方法 | 37 |
| 8 | US20140074415A1 | Merging unit and method of operating a merging unit | 33 |
| 9 | CN103439679A | 智能变电站互感器数据采集系统绝对延时检测装置及方法 | 32 |
| 10 | US6954704B2 | Digital protection and control device | 32 |
Citation counts inside a searched corpus favour older filings that have had more years to accumulate citations — read these as signals of influence on the field, not as a ranking of current technical importance.
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 filing strategy
Three patterns worth acting on before drafting claims in this space.
The top of the field is dense, not open
Five assignees hold 167 of the 436 records in scope. That is not a fragmented emerging field — it is one where a small set of grid operators and electronics majors have already staked out core accuracy-class and calibration claims. New entrants should expect prior art collisions on the most obvious claim language.
Activity has cooled from its 2019 high
Filings peaked at 32 in 2019, sat at 13 by the 2022 midpoint, and have continued down since — recent-year totals for several leading assignees show 0 filings and -100% year-on-year. This reads as a maturing claim space rather than an active filing race, though publication lag means the very latest years are undercounted.
Measurement claims dominate over communication claims
G01R (measurement) and H02J (power supply) together frame most of the activity, while digital transmission (H04L, 4.4%) and control systems (G05B, 3.7%) are comparatively thin. That gap is notable given how central IEC 61850 process-bus communication is to merging-unit deployment in practice.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to merging units and non-conventional instrument transformers, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the field is thinning
Filing is concentrated among grid-infrastructure and industrial-electronics assignees, with co-filing patterns pointing to close institute-utility relationships rather than open competition.
One filer sets the pace by a wide margin
The leading assignee holds 80 records, more than four times the fifth-place count of 18 and ten times the tenth-place count of 8 — a steep drop-off that marks this as a leader-plus-long-tail structure rather than an even spread.
The strongest ties are institute-utility pairings
The strongest co-assignee pair shares 27 records, well ahead of the next strongest pairs at 6 and 4. This pattern of a grid utility filing jointly with a research institute suggests centralised R&D feeding standardised deployment, rather than open-market licensing.
Filing is heavily routed through China and Europe
China accounts for 209 receiving-office filings, well ahead of EPO at 66 and the United States at 47, with India, Japan and Austria trailing further behind. Anyone benchmarking freedom-to-operate should weight Chinese prior art accordingly.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| State Grid Corporation of China | 0 | -100% |
| China Electric Power Research Institute Co., Ltd. | 0 | -100% |
| Toshiba Corporation | 0 | — |
| Beijing Kyland Technology Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| LG Electronics Inc. | 0 | — |
| Knorr-Bremse Systeme fuer Nutzfahrzeuge GmbH | 0 | — |
| Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Royal Philips) | 0 | — |
| Schneider Electric USA, Inc. | 0 | — |
Where to take this next
The dataset points to a mature, concentrated claim space with specific thin spots. Two directions follow from that.
Map freedom-to-operate against the top assignees
With 38.3% of records held by five filers, a targeted FTO review of their accuracy-class, calibration and redundancy claims will surface collisions faster than a broad prior-art sweep.
Run an FTO search in Eureka →Draft around the under-claimed branches
Latency compensation, drift correction and cybersecurity immunity for merging units show thinner claim density than the core measurement cluster — a first claim there faces less crowded prior art.
Explore white space in Eureka →Common questions on this landscape
A merging unit is the device that takes analogue current and voltage signals from conventional or non-conventional instrument transformers and converts them into a digital, time-synchronised data stream — typically an IEC 61850 sampled-values stream — for use by protection relays and monitoring systems. It sits between the sensor (optical current transformer, Rogowski coil, or similar) and the digital substation network. Patent claims in this space concentrate heavily on accuracy class, calibration, and redundant power supply, which is why measurement-related IPC classes dominate this dataset.
Filing in this dataset is concentrated: the top 5 assignees account for 167 of the 436 records in scope, or 38.3%, and the leading single assignee holds 80 records — well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 18. The field also shows strong co-filing between a leading grid utility and a research institute, sharing 27 records, which points to centralised institutional R&D rather than a fragmented competitive landscape. Full ranking detail covers 100 assignees, the complete set returned by the underlying search.
No — filing peaked at 32 records in 2019 and has declined since, sitting at 13 by 2022 and falling further toward 1 by 2026. Several of the leading assignees show 0 filings in the latest year with -100% year-on-year change. That said, publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the most recent one to two years in any dataset are always undercounted and the true 2025-2026 picture may look less steep once those filings publish.
US11420575B2, assigned to Knorr-Bremse Systeme fuer Nutzfahrzeuge GmbH and granted in August 2022, claims a power supply architecture for an energy management and monitoring unit. Its core elements are a line arrangement of multiple input/output power lines, a merging unit that combines those lines into a total voltage, and a splitting unit that divides that combined voltage into at least two redundant voltages for the monitoring unit. It is notable for treating the merging unit as a power-domain redundancy component rather than purely a data-aggregation function, which is the more common framing elsewhere in this dataset.
Relative to the dominant measurement (G01R, 41.1% of 436 records) and power-supply (H02J, 24.3%) clusters, digital transmission claims (H04L, 4.4%) and control-system claims (G05B, 3.7%) are comparatively thin. Specific sub-areas worth checking for open claim space include IEC 61850 process-bus latency compensation, long-term drift correction for optical current sensors, and cybersecurity immunity for merging units — all areas that intersect the core measurement claims but are not yet as densely claimed. Any first filing there should still be checked against the leading assignees' broader patent families before drafting.
Research Merging Units and Non-Conventional Instrument Transformers in depth with Eureka
Go past this page: query the whole merging units and non-conventional instrument transformers 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.