Plasma Doping Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- Concentrated at the top. The five most active filers hold 160 of 231 records in scope (69.3%), and the top ten hold 192 (83.1%) — this field is not a long tail story.
- H01L dominates, H10P is close behind. 83.1% of records sit in H01L (semiconductor devices) and 51.1% in H10P, while G02F (optical control) appears in only 1.7% — a narrow adjacency almost nobody has claimed.
- Filing activity has cooled from its 2017 peak. Annual filings peaked at 4 in 2017 and recent-year momentum across the leading assignees reads flat to zero, though the last one to two years are understated by publication lag.
Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 231 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This landscape tracks patent activity where the claim language centres on plasma doping and conformal doping, cross-referenced against implementation concerns that separate a lab process from a fab-ready one: conformality on fins, low-energy dose control, damage-layer management, monolayer doping, throughput, and process window. That combination narrows the corpus to 231 published records spanning 2015 through the 2026 cut-off, weighted toward the semiconductor device classes rather than general plasma physics.
The records concentrate in equipment and device-fabrication claims rather than materials chemistry, and the receiving-office spread points to where enforcement and freedom-to-operate questions actually matter: the United States leads by a wide margin, with PCT, European, Taiwanese, Japanese and South Korean filings trailing in that order.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 231 records: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claims.
Filing trend
Filings ran at a low but steady pace through the period, peaking at 4 in 2017. Recent years trend down toward the 2026 cut-off, but publication lag of roughly 18 months means the final one to two years understate true filing activity.
IPC composition
H01L (semiconductor devices) touches 83.1% of records and H10P 51.1%, confirming this is fundamentally a device-fabrication claim set. H01J (electron and discharge tubes) and C23C (coating and surface deposition) each carry a meaningful minority share, while H05H (plasma and particle accelerators), H10B (memory device manufacture) and G02F (optical control) show progressively thinner coverage — since a single record can carry several classes, these shares add to more than 100% of the 231 records.
Shares are the percentage of the 231 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Plasma Doping and Alternative Doping Methods with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about plasma doping and alternative doping methods and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited records in this space
Plasma doping method and plasma doping apparatus
A plasma doping method that keeps dose uniform across repeated treatments by managing a maintenance step for the vacuum chamber's inner-wall film, addressing the drift that otherwise builds up as impurity-containing film accumulates on chamber surfaces over repeated cycles.Filed by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic), published 2007-08-02.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20080132046A1 | Plasma Doping With Electronically Controllable Implant Angle | 593 |
| 2 | US20120238074A1 | Methods and apparatus for conformal doping | 486 |
| 3 | US4912065A | Plasma doping method | 267 |
| 4 | US6182604B1 | Hollow cathode for plasma doping system | 165 |
| 5 | US20130093026A1 | Selective fin-shaping process using plasma doping and etching for 3-dimensional transistor applications | 109 |
| 6 | US20060236931A1 | Tilted Plasma Doping | 100 |
| 7 | US6403453B1 | Dose control technique for plasma doping in ultra-shallow junction formations | 85 |
| 8 | US7126808B2 | Wafer platen equipped with electrostatic clamp, wafer backside gas cooling, and high voltage operation capabi… | 84 |
| 9 | US6518113B1 | Doping of thin amorphous silicon work function control layers of MOS gate electrodes | 79 |
| 10 | US6051482A | Method for manufacturing buried-channel PMOS | 59 |
Citation counts are a signal of influence within this searched corpus, not a measure of current commercial relevance — older filings accumulate citations simply by being available longer.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three read-throughs from the concentration, class and citation data above.
This is a concentrated field, not a fragmented one
With the top five assignees holding 160 of 231 records and the top ten holding 192, most of the claim space in plasma and conformal doping is already staked out by a small group. A new entrant is filing into occupied ground almost by default.
Optical-control adjacency is barely touched
G02F (optical control and modulation) appears in only 4 of 231 records, well below every other class tracked. That gap sits next to a densely claimed core (H01L at 83.1%), which is the classic shape of an under-claimed adjacency rather than a dead end.
Influence sits with older foundational filings
The most-cited records date back well before the 2015 window opens, including a 1989-era method patent still drawing citations. That pattern favours reading them as the baseline prior art any new claim must design around, not as current competitive activity.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to plasma doping and alternative doping methods, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the claim space, and where it's thin
The ranked leaders account for the bulk of filings, but recent-year momentum has gone flat across the board — the open questions are less about who leads today and more about where the next claim can actually land.
One filer well ahead of the field
The leading assignee holds 59 records, more than double the fifth-place holder's 14. That gap at the top, combined with a fifth-to-tenth range narrowing to 5 records, is a steep drop-off rather than a gradual one.
Recent-year filing has gone quiet across every major holder
Every one of the tracked leading assignees shows zero filings in the latest recorded year, including a -100% year-on-year reading for one major equipment maker. Read this alongside the roughly 18-month publication lag before treating it as a real slowdown.
Co-filing is limited and inventor-anchored
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear across the dataset, and the strongest links pair one equipment maker with named individual inventors rather than with other companies. Cross-company joint filing is not a meaningful feature of this field.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates | 0 | — |
| Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic) | 0 | — |
| Micron Technology, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Applied Materials, Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (TSMC) | 0 | — |
| SINGH VIKRAM | 0 | — |
| Lam Research Corporation | 0 | — |
| Tokyo Electron Limited | 0 | — |
Where to take this
The landscape data points to specific next checks rather than a general conclusion.
Check freedom-to-operate against the top five
Since 69.3% of records sit with five assignees, any new filing in fin-conformal or low-energy-dose doping should be checked against their claim scope first, not the field broadly.
Run an FTO check in EurekaProbe the G02F and H10B adjacencies
Thin coverage in optical-control-linked and memory-specific doping claims suggests room for a first-mover claim rather than a crowded one.
Explore white space in EurekaRead the foundational citations before drafting
The highest-cited records predate this dataset's window and function as baseline prior art; any new claim needs to design around them explicitly.
Pull citation chains in EurekaCommon questions on plasma doping patents
Filings are concentrated: the leading assignee holds 59 of the 231 records in scope, more than four times the tenth-place holder's 5. The top five assignees together account for 160 records, or 69.3% of everything in scope, and the top ten account for 192, or 83.1%. That means most freedom-to-operate work in this field should start with those leading holders rather than a broad search across all 73 ranked companies.
Filing activity peaked at 4 records in 2017 and recent-year counts trend toward zero, with every major tracked assignee showing flat or -100% year-on-year movement in the latest recorded year. Some of that apparent slowdown is real, but publication lag of roughly 18 months means the most recent one to two years are understated in any patent dataset, so treat the very latest figures as provisional rather than final.
This Matsushita (Panasonic) filing from 2007 covers a plasma doping method that maintains uniform dose across repeated treatments by managing a maintenance step for film buildup on the vacuum chamber's inner wall. It is a process-control claim aimed at repeatability rather than a claim on plasma doping broadly, so it constrains chamber-maintenance and dose-uniformity approaches more than it blocks doping methods generally.
The class-level data shows G02F (optical control and modulation) present in only 1.7% of the 231 records, and H10B (memory device manufacture) in 7.8%, both well below the dense H01L core at 83.1%. These thinner classes sit adjacent to heavily claimed territory, which is the profile of genuine under-claimed space rather than an area nobody wants to work in — worth checking before assuming the whole field is closed.
With 83.1% of all 231 records held by just ten of the 73 ranked assignees, this field sits toward the concentrated end: most of the claim space is occupied by a small group rather than spread across many single-filing entrants. Co-filing is also limited, with only 10 co-assignee pairs recorded and the strongest pairing linking one equipment maker to individual named inventors rather than another company, so competitive dynamics here run through a handful of large filers rather than broad industry collaboration.
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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.