In this landscape, it is a filing that addresses a specific wearout mechanism — bias temperature instability, hot carrier injection, or time dependent dielectric breakdown — together with a quantitative acceleration or lifetime-extrapolation method such as activation energy, voltage acceleration, or electromigration lifetime modeling. A patent describing only a test structure without an extrapolation method, or only a modeling technique without a named mechanism, generally falls outside this specific intersection. The scope was built to capture the overlap between the physical failure mode and the method used to project device life from stress data, which is narrower than general semiconductor reliability.

The ranking covers 100 companies across 785 records, with the leading assignee holding 90 records and a steep but not exclusionary drop to 34 records at fifth place. Combined, the top 5 assignees account for 37.5% of all 785 records in scope, and the top 10 reach 51.8%. That leaves close to half of all filings coming from outside the ranked leaders, spread across a long tail of smaller and newer entrants.

Filing peaked in 2017 at 58 records and has since settled onto a lower plateau. Looking at the most recent span that can be treated as complete, 2021 to 2024, filings moved from 20 to 18 records, a -10% change — a mild pullback rather than a steep decline. Because publication typically lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 figures in any dataset will understate actual filing activity and should not be read as evidence the field is cooling.