Power Diode Termination Patents: Leaders & Filing Trends 2026
A data-driven look at power diode termination patents from 2015 onward: who holds the most patent families, where filings are concentrated by IPC class, and where filing activity has cooled since its 2018 peak.
Filing growth = 2021 (69 records) → 2024 (14); 2024 is the last year we treat as complete. Top-5 share = the 5 largest assignees ÷ all 1,257 records in scope (CR5), not the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
Power diode termination structures manage the electric field at the edge of a power semiconductor die — the region where breakdown voltage is won or lost. This landscape covers 1,257 published records filed or published between 2015 and the 2026-08-31 data cut-off, drawn from claims and titles referencing power diode termination or diode termination structures classified under H01L29 / H10D30. Patent families, rather than raw document counts, are the fairer unit for judging real filing activity, because families neutralise aggressive continuation practice and multi-jurisdiction refiling of the same invention.
The scope spans structural claims on edge termination and guard-ring geometry as well as circuit-level claims — clamp, ESD and gate-drive protection — that reference diode termination as part of a larger power device or display driver. Receiving-office data shows the United States as the dominant office (756 records), with Europe, Japan, South Korea, WIPO and the UK each carrying a smaller but active share. Readers should treat the 2025–2026 tail of any trend as understated: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the most recent complete filing year for growth comparisons is 2024.
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 1,257 records: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claim density.
Filings peaked in 2018 and have since pulled back sharply
Annual filings ran from 58 in 2017 to a peak of 70 in 2018, then declined; the last fully comparable window shows 69 records in 2021 falling to 14 in 2024, an 80% drop over three years. 2025 and 2026 figures will continue to rise as publications catch up with filing dates, so they should not be read as a continuation of the decline.
Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in. Growth rates on this page therefore end at 2024; running them to the last bar would understate the field.
H01L and H10D dominate; circuit-level classes add a second axis of claims
H01L (90.9% of records) and H10D (43.7%) confirm that termination structure claims sit overwhelmingly in core semiconductor-device classification. H03K (26.3%), H02M (14.2%) and H02H (6.6%) show a meaningful share of filings claim termination behaviour through switching, conversion or protection circuitry rather than the die structure alone — because a record can carry several IPC classes, these shares add up to more than 100% of the record total, which is expected.
Shares are the percentage of the 1,257 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Power Semiconductors: Power Diode Termination Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about power semiconductors: power diode termination patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited prior art in scope
US20100051963A1 — "Power transistor" (Infineon Technologies AG, 2010-03-04)
A power transistor with a first terminal, second terminal and control terminal, built on a support layer of one bandgap material carrying an active region of a second, wider-bandgap material. The active region forms part of the forward-mode current path and includes at least one pn-junction — a wide-bandgap structural approach to the terminal and junction design that sits at the centre of this landscape's structural claims.Filed by Infineon Technologies AG; illustrative of the wide-bandgap structural approach common across the top-cited records.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US5079608A | Power MOSFET transistor circuit with active clamp | 242 |
| 2 | US20070085847A1 | Display device and driving method thereof | 151 |
| 3 | US5637900A | Latchup-free fully-protected CMOS on-chip ESD protection circuit | 147 |
| 4 | US20030042538A1 | Silicon carbide power device having protective diode and method for manufacturing silicon carbide power devic… | 133 |
| 5 | US5672992A | Charge pump circuit for high side switch | 133 |
| 6 | US20100157710A1 | Array Operation Using A Schottky Diode As a Non-Ohmic Isolation Device | 130 |
| 7 | US5892260A | SOI-type semiconductor device with variable threshold voltages | 118 |
| 8 | US5545909A | Electrostatic discharge protection device for integrated circuit | 112 |
| 9 | US20190172683A1 | Switching circuit | 106 |
| 10 | US6396090B1 | Trench MOS device and termination structure | 104 |
Citation counts are drawn from within this searched corpus. They favour older filings that have had more years to accumulate citations, so treat them as a signal of influence on later filers rather than of current commercial importance.
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 numbers mean for a filing decision
Four figures from the dataset, and what each implies for where to file, who to watch, and where claim space is still open.
The top of the field is dense but not closed
The five leading assignees combined hold 18.1% of all records in scope, rising to 29.5% for the top 10 — meaningful concentration, but it still leaves roughly 70% of filings spread across a long tail of the ranked leaders and beyond. New entrants competing on structural termination claims should expect prior art from a handful of established players, not a single blocking owner.
Structural termination filing has genuinely cooled
After peaking at 70 records in 2018, filings fell steadily through the last fully comparable years, dropping 80% from 2021 to 2024. That is a real contraction in new structural claims on this exact problem, not an artefact of the publication lag that still affects 2025–2026 figures.
Circuit-level claims are a second, active front
H01L accounts for 90.9% of records, confirming most claims sit on the semiconductor structure itself, but H03K (26.3%) and H02M (14.2%) show a substantial secondary claim front in switching and power-conversion circuitry built around termination behaviour, rather than the structure alone.
Filing strategy still centres on the US office
The United States receives close to six times as many records as the next-largest office, Europe. Anyone assessing freedom to operate should weight US prosecution history most heavily, while treating Japan and South Korea filings as a secondary but non-trivial check given their combined volume.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to power semiconductors: power diode termination patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
| Assignee | Co-assignee | Shared families |
|---|---|---|
| Hitachi, Ltd. | Hitachi Via Mechanics, Ltd. | 8 |
| Hitachi, Ltd. | Next Generation PDP Development Center Co., Ltd. | 4 |
| STMicroelectronics S.r.l. (Italy) | Southern Microelectronics Research Consortium | 3 |
| STMicroelectronics S.r.l. (Italy) | RONSISVALLE CESARE | 3 |
| STMicroelectronics S.r.l. (Italy) | ENEA VINCENZO | 3 |
| Vishay General Semiconductor LLC | UDREA FLORIN | 3 |
| Vishay General Semiconductor LLC | LIN YIH YIN | 3 |
| Vishay General Semiconductor LLC | HSU CHIH WEI | 3 |
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear across the dataset, and the strongest pairing recurs at just 8 shared records — most work in this field is filed by a single assignee rather than through joint ventures or research consortia.
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to three practical next steps for a team deciding where to file or where to watch.
Check freedom to operate against the concentrated leaders
With 29.5% of all 1,257 records held by the top 10 assignees, a claim chart against their most recent structural filings is the fastest way to see whether a planned termination design sits inside occupied claim space.
Run a claim comparison in EurekaRead the 2025–2026 dip as incomplete, not as an opening
Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the apparent low filing counts for 2025 and 2026 will rise as more records publish — treat the 2021-to-2024 trend as the reliable read on where activity is heading.
Track live filing updates in EurekaProbe the circuit-level classes for open claim space
H03K and H02M carry meaningful shares of records but sit well below H01L's density, suggesting termination-linked switching and conversion claims may be less crowded than structural claims on the diode itself.
Explore IPC white space in EurekaCommon questions about power diode termination patents
A termination structure is the region at the edge of a power semiconductor die that controls how the electric field spreads when the device is reverse-biased, and it largely determines the diode's actual breakdown voltage rather than the theoretical value of the bulk material. Because getting this wrong causes premature edge breakdown even when the core junction is sound, termination geometry — guard rings, field plates, junction termination extension — is claimed as its own invention distinct from the active junction. That is why this dataset, built on claims referencing power diode termination specifically, returns over a thousand records even though it sits inside the much larger power semiconductor field.
The dataset ranks 100 companies by patent family count, with the leader holding 50 records and the fifth-placed assignee at 40; the top five combined account for 18.1% of all 1,257 records in scope. That leaves the majority of filings distributed across a long tail beyond the top 10, so no single company controls the field outright. A freedom-to-operate review should still start with the leaders' most recent filings, since they hold a disproportionate share of the claim space relative to any individual competitor.
Filings peaked at 70 records in 2018 and have declined since; comparing the last two fully comparable years, 2021 (69 records) to 2024 (14 records), shows an 80% drop. That is a genuine slowdown in new structural claims on this specific problem. The 2025 and 2026 counts in the raw data look even lower, but that reflects the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication rather than a further collapse in activity, so those years should not be read as continuing the decline.
This Infineon Technologies AG filing claims a power transistor built from a support layer of one bandgap material carrying an active region of a wider-bandgap material, with the active region forming part of the forward-mode current path and including at least one pn-junction. It represents a structural, wide-bandgap approach to the terminal and junction region rather than a narrow geometric trick, which is part of why it sits among the most-cited records in this corpus. Anyone designing a termination structure using a heterojunction between differing bandgap materials should read its full claim set closely before finalising a design, though citation volume reflects influence on later filers rather than a guarantee of enforceability today.
Start with H01L, which covers 90.9% of the 1,257 records in scope and is the primary home for structural termination claims, and H10D at 43.7% for general semiconductor device structure. Then check H03K (26.3%) and H02M (14.2%), which capture claims where termination behaviour is described through switching or power-conversion circuitry rather than the diode structure itself. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC classes, do not treat these shares as mutually exclusive buckets — a comprehensive search needs to span at least H01L, H10D and H03K to avoid missing circuit-level claims that reference the same termination problem.
Research Power Semiconductors: Power Diode Termination Patent Landscape in depth with Eureka
Go past this page: query the whole power semiconductors: power diode termination patent landscape 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.