The assignee ranking in this corpus is led by a single academic assignee holding 125 of the 507 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked assignee at 29 and tenth-ranked at 13. The leading names are dominated by universities and named individual inventors rather than large electronics manufacturers, and the top five assignees together account for 82.4% of all 507 records. This concentration means the foundational geometry and fabrication claims were largely staked out early, and newer filers are more likely to find open space in application-specific integration than in the base interconnect structure itself.

Filing activity peaked at 32 records in 2017 and has declined since, with a -100% change measured between 2021 and 2024. However, patent publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the most recent one to two years in any dataset always understate real activity — the 2025-2026 figures here are still filling in and should not be read as a current decline. The honest read is that the foundational filing wave crested years ago and 2024 is the last year that can be treated as a complete picture.

The dataset's IPC composition shows A61B (diagnosis and surgery) touching 46.5% of the 507 records and H01L (semiconductor devices) at 32.9%, reflecting how often interconnect claims are written inside a medical-device or sensing-system context. H05K (printed circuits) sits at 28.2%, while the dedicated conductor class H01B is comparatively thin at 5.3%. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC codes, these percentages add up to more than 100% and should be read as coverage, not a partition of the field.

US20220117082A1, filed by National University of Singapore and published 2022-04-14, covers a stretchable interconnect structure built from an electrically conductive wire formed into a three-dimensional helical shape and embedded in an elastic substrate, plus the fabrication method for producing it. That combination — a helical (rather than planar serpentine) conductor geometry embedded directly in an elastomer — is narrower than the general concept of a stretchable interconnect, so it primarily constrains designs using this specific helical-embedding approach rather than serpentine or meander-trace interconnects generally. Anyone evaluating freedom to operate should compare their conductor's specific geometry and embedding method against this claim language rather than assuming it blocks all stretchable-interconnect designs.

The IPC composition points to under-claimed territory in dedicated conductor and cable claims (H01B, 5.3% of records) and in non-medical printed-circuit assemblies (H05K, 28.2%), both thinner than the dominant diagnosis (A61B, 46.5%) and semiconductor (H01L, 32.9%) classes. This suggests most existing claims tie the interconnect to a specific medical or sensing application rather than protecting the conductor geometry or fabrication method on its own. A first claim decoupled from a body-worn or implantable use case, focused instead on the conductor material, winding geometry or substrate-embedding process, sits in comparatively less crowded claim space, though it should still be checked against the most-cited foundational records before drafting.