Onboard Charger Regenerative Braking Patents: Top Filers & Trends 2026
- Filing peaked in 2022 at 32 families, and the pace since has flattened rather than accelerated, unusual for a subsystem still being redesigned around bidirectional charging.
- B60L (EV propulsion) covers 115 of 168 families, but H02M power-conversion claims sit underneath nearly a third of the corpus — the conversion topology is where the real contestable claim space lives.
- Only four co-assignee pairs exist across 168 families, and the strongest single pairing accounts for 14 co-filings — most applicants are filing alone, not through joint ventures.
What this landscape covers
This landscape tracks patent families that combine onboard charger hardware — the on-vehicle AC/DC conversion stage — with bidirectional charging, vehicle-to-grid or energy recovery claims. That intersection is narrower than onboard charging generally: it excludes chargers that only push power into the battery and excludes grid-side bidirectional inverters that never sit on the vehicle. The corpus runs from 2015 through the 2026-07-31 cut-off, with 168 total patent families identified.
Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 counts in the trend chart understate real filing activity; treat the last one to two bars as a floor, not a ceiling.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 168 families: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claims.
Filing trend: rise, peak, plateau
Filings were negligible before 2018, climbed through the early 2020s, and peaked at 32 families in 2022. The years since sit at or below that midpoint level, which reads as a technology whose core claim territory has already been staked out rather than one still in a filing surge.
Where the claims sit
B60L (electric vehicle propulsion) touches 115 of the 168 families, confirming this is filed and framed as vehicle technology first. H02J (power supply and grid systems, 75) and H02M (power conversion, 51) are the next-heaviest classes, showing that the grid-interface and conversion-topology layers are where the detailed engineering claims land. Smaller counts in H02P, B60H, H01M, F25D and G01R mark thinner but real adjacent claim activity in motor control, thermal management, cell-level integration and measurement.
Shares are the percentage of the 168 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
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Try EurekaMost-cited records in this corpus
Module of suppressing inrush current, method of controlling the same and on-board bidirectional charger using the same
The disclosure proposes a module for suppressing inrush current, a method of controlling it, and an on-board bidirectional charger that uses it. The charger combines a PFC-inverter module with the inrush-suppression module, whose controlled switch sits in parallel with a suppressor circuit. The charging and inverting circuits are fully multiplexed, addressing the problem of high-power onboard chargers under harsh AC supply conditions during bidirectional operation.Filed by Delta Electronics, published 2019-11-14 as US20190348833A1.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20210325069A1 | Integrated community energy and harvesting system | 78 |
| 2 | US20200212816A1 | On-board charging/discharging system and control method thereof | 49 |
| 3 | US20200031238A1 | Vehicle-Solar-Grid Integration for Back up Power | 43 |
| 4 | US20190348833A1 | Module of suppressing inrush current, method of controlling the same and on-board bidirectional charger using… | 39 |
| 5 | US20210155104A1 | Device for bi-directional power conversion and charging for use with electric vehicles | 31 |
| 6 | WO2021244832A1 | Electric mobile refrigeration unit | 23 |
| 7 | US20230174008A1 | Electric mobile refrigeration unit | 21 |
| 8 | EP3782849A2 | A DC charging device for an electric vehicle and for providing power management of a connected grid | 19 |
| 9 | US20220001762A1 | Portable electric generator for charging electric vehicles | 18 |
| 10 | GB2595970A | Electric mobile refrigeration unit | 16 |
Citation counts are drawn from the searched corpus only and favour older filings that have had more time to accumulate citations; read them as a signal of influence within this dataset, not as a ranking of current commercial importance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for filing decisions
Three read-throughs from the filing trend, the IPC split and the citation table.
The surge already happened
Filing volume rose from near zero in 2017 to a peak of 32 families in 2022, then flattened. A flat post-peak trend after a sharp rise usually means the obvious implementations are already claimed and new filings are narrowing into specific circuit or control variants rather than staking fresh ground.
Vehicle-side framing dominates
Two-thirds of the corpus is classified under B60L, confirming that most applicants frame this as EV propulsion technology rather than as a grid or power-electronics invention. H02M's 51 families show the conversion topology itself is the more technically contested layer beneath that framing.
Older system-level filings lead citations
The most-cited record in this corpus is a broad community energy and harvesting system filing, followed by system- and module-level bidirectional charger patents. Citation leadership here reflects age and breadth of claim, not necessarily what a 2026 filer should worry about design-around risk for.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to onboard charger regenerative braking, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and how they're organised
168 families, only four recorded co-assignee pairs, and a recent-year momentum picture where almost every tracked assignee shows zero or negative year-on-year filing.
Joint filing is the exception
The strongest co-assignee pair recorded a 14-family joint pattern; the next strongest pairs sit at 4 and 2. Outside these clusters, the overwhelming majority of the corpus is filed by a single assignee, meaning most competitive intelligence here is about individual companies' internal roadmaps rather than alliance strategy.
Recent-year filing has cooled broadly
Several of the assignees with historical filing weight show zero families in the most recent tracked year, with some down -100% year over year. Given the 18-month publication lag, some of this is reporting delay rather than a genuine stop, but the breadth of the slowdown across multiple assignees is notable.
US and Europe carry the volume
The United States receives 80 filings and Europe (EPO) 39, well ahead of WIPO/PCT, Germany, India and China. That split suggests applicants are prioritising direct US and European protection over broad PCT filings, worth noting when assessing where enforcement risk actually concentrates.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York | 1 | — |
| GM Global Technology Operations LLC | 0 | — |
| Delta Electronics, Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| Kia Motors Corporation | 0 | -100% |
| Hyundai Motor Company | 0 | -100% |
| Huawei Digital Power Technologies Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| SUNSWAP LTD | 0 | — |
| WATT & WELL | 0 | — |
Where to take this
Two directions depending on whether you need to file, or need to defend a filing decision.
Map claims against a specific product design
Run the inrush-suppression and multiplexed charging/inverting circuit claims in the representative filing against your own topology before committing to a PFC-inverter architecture.
Explore this landscape in EurekaTrack the assignees with recent zero-momentum
Several historically active filers show no recent-year activity; confirm whether that reflects publication lag or an actual pause before assuming the space has gone quiet.
Set up assignee monitoring in EurekaCommon questions on this landscape
It is an on-vehicle AC/DC conversion unit whose claims explicitly cover reverse power flow — discharging the vehicle battery back to the grid, home load or another external system — rather than one-way battery charging. The search excludes chargers that only support unidirectional charging and excludes grid-side bidirectional inverters that never sit on the vehicle. This narrows the corpus to 168 patent families, which is smaller than the broader onboard-charger field but more relevant to V2G and energy-recovery product decisions.
Filing volume rose sharply from near zero in 2017 to a peak of 32 families in 2022, and years since have stayed at or below that level rather than climbing further. That pattern is consistent with a technology whose core claim territory is already staked, though the most recent one to two years are likely undercounted because publication typically lags filing by about 18 months. It is not yet clear whether the plateau is permanent or a temporary lull ahead of a new design wave.
B60L (electric vehicle propulsion) covers the largest share at 115 of 168 families, but H02J (power supply and grid systems, 75) and H02M (power conversion, 51) carry the denser technical claims around grid interfacing and conversion topology. A freedom-to-operate search limited to B60L alone would miss a large share of the relevant conversion-circuit prior art sitting in H02M and H02J. Smaller classes like H02P and H01M matter for motor-control and cell-level integration claims specifically.
Mostly alone. Only four co-assignee pairs appear across the full 168-family corpus, and the strongest pairing accounts for just 14 joint families. This means most competitive tracking in this space should focus on individual assignees' independent filing programs rather than on joint ventures or cross-licensing alliances, which are the exception here rather than the norm.
The filing, from Delta Electronics, claims a specific combination: a PFC-inverter module paired with an inrush-current-suppression module whose controlled switch sits in parallel with a suppressor circuit, with the charging and inverting circuits fully multiplexed. It blocks that specific circuit-level combination for suppressing inrush current in a bidirectional context, not bidirectional charging generally. A design that suppresses inrush current through a different circuit topology, or that does not multiplex the charging and inverting paths, sits outside this specific claim scope.
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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.