One assignee leads the ranked field with 86 records, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 49 and the tenth at 34. The top 5 assignees together hold 21.1% of all 1,510 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 33.7%, which means the majority of filings — roughly two-thirds — sit outside the leading group across a long tail of smaller filers. This is a moderately concentrated field rather than one dominated by a single gatekeeper, so new entrants have room to build a position without displacing an incumbent outright.

Filing peaked in 2017 at 84 records and has since eased; comparing the two most recent complete years available, 2021 (51 records) to 2024 (34 records), shows a 33% decline. However, publication lags actual filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in and should not be read as continued decline. The honest read is that the field cooled off its 2017 peak, not that it is currently collapsing.

H01L (semiconductor devices) is the dominant class, appearing in 72.9% of the 1,510 records, reflecting how most filings describe the module structure itself. H01G and H10P each cover 11.1% of records, H10K (organic semiconductors) covers 8.0%, and H02S (photovoltaic generation) covers 5.4%. The laser (H01S, 3.2%) and welding/soldering/brazing (B23K, 5.2%) classes, which cover the actual scribing and joining hardware, are comparatively thin — worth checking closely if you are filing on tooling rather than device architecture.