RF Acoustic Filter Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
- Filing has cooled since its 2022 peak. 254 published families in 2022 against 126 in 2017 and only 15 so far in the still-filling 2026 year — the growth phase for this claim space has already happened.
- Japan and the US dominate where filings land. 2,055 records route through the Japanese receiving office and 1,495 through the US, more than China (1,029), EPO (665) and Korea (520) combined against either single leader.
- Ownership is fragmented outside a handful of tight pairings. Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear across the dataset, and the strongest single pairing accounts for 121 co-filed records — most other collaboration is one-off.
Filing growth compares 2021 (151 records) with 2024 (175) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 6,529 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the RF acoustic filter patent record shows
RF acoustic filters sit at the intersection of piezoelectric materials science and RF front-end design, and the patent record reflects that split: claims cluster tightly around H03H impedance-network and filter classifications, with secondary density in semiconductor device structure (H01L), RF transmission (H04B) and solid-state device variants (H10N). That concentration in a single core subclass, alongside thinner but real activity in packaging and waveguide classes, tells a filer where the crowded ground actually is before they draft a single claim.
The dataset covers 6,529 published families filed between 2015 and the 2026 cut-off, giving a decade-long view of how BAW and SAW claim activity has moved through its growth phase and into a plateau. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the low count in the most recent year understates real filing activity rather than signalling an actual drop-off.
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Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 6,529-family dataset: how filing volume has moved year over year, and how those filings distribute across IPC subclasses. Read together they show a technology that expanded fast, peaked, and is now being defended rather than pioneered.
A decade of BAW and SAW filing activity
Published families rose from 126 in 2017 to a peak of 254 in 2022, then eased off. With 2022 sitting at the dataset's midpoint and no year since exceeding it, the filing curve reads as flat-to-declining rather than accelerating — consistent with a claim space that filled up during the 5G front-end build-out and has since matured.
Where the claims concentrate
H03H (impedance networks and filters) accounts for 6,519 of 6,529 records, effectively the entire dataset, confirming the search is well-targeted at the core technology. The next-largest classes — H01L semiconductor devices at 458 and H04B transmission at 386 — mark where acoustic filter claims spill into device integration and system-level RF design, the more likely areas for a differentiated filing today.
Shares are the percentage of the 6,529 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on RF Acoustic Filter Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about rf acoustic filter landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited prior art and a representative recent filing
US20210203305A1 — Bulk acoustic wave resonator on surface acoustic wave device
An acoustic wave filter component can include a surface acoustic wave device including a first piezoelectric layer, an interdigital transducer electrode on the first piezoelectric layer, and an additional layer, such as a temperature compensation layer, over the interdigital transducer electrode. The acoustic wave filter component can also include a bulk acoustic wave resonator supported by the additional layer. The additional layer may be a layer on which a surface acoustic wave of the surface acoustic wave device will propagate. The bulk acoustic wave resonator may include an air cavity, where a shape of the air cavity is defined in part by the additional layer.Filed by Skyworks Solutions, published 2021-07-01. The claim structure combines a SAW device's temperature-compensation layer with a BAW resonator's air cavity in a single hybrid stack.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20160028367A1 | Single crystal acoustic resonator and bulk acoustic wave filter | 357 |
| 2 | US5872493A | Bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filter having a top portion that includes a protective acoustic mirror | 350 |
| 3 | US20190273480A1 | Lamb wave loop circuit for acoustic wave filter | 317 |
| 4 | US7105980B2 | Saw filter device and method employing normal temperature bonding for producing desirable filter production a… | 304 |
| 5 | US20190068164A1 | 5G BAND n79 ACOUSTIC WAVE RESONATOR RF FILTER CIRCUIT | 283 |
| 6 | WO2016017104A1 | Acoustic wave filters and duplexers using same | 276 |
| 7 | US10200013B2 | Micro-transfer-printed acoustic wave filter device | 254 |
| 8 | US5726610A | Saw filter device for radio tranceiver utilizing different coupling coefficient ratios | 244 |
| 9 | US6707229B1 | Surface acoustic wave filter | 240 |
| 10 | US20190348966A1 | Acoustic wave filter formed on a v-groove topography and method for producing the same | 196 |
Citation counts accumulate over time and favour older filings; treat this table as a map of foundational and influential art, not a ranking of current commercial relevance.
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Three patterns stand out once the raw counts are set against each other: where filing activity has already peaked, where geographic filing strategy concentrates, and how citation weight distributes across a small set of foundational patents.
Growth phase has already run
Published families roughly doubled between 2017 and the 2022 peak, then held flat or declined in every year since. A new entrant filing today is defending or extending existing positions in a mature claim space, not staking out unclaimed ground in the core BAW/SAW resonator structure.
Japan is the largest single filing venue
More records route through the Japanese receiving office than any other, ahead of the US, with China, EPO and South Korea following at lower but still substantial volumes. Freedom-to-operate work on acoustic filters needs Japanese-language prior art review, not just US and EPO searches.
A small set of older patents anchors the field
The most-cited records span single-crystal resonator structures, protective acoustic mirror designs, Lamb wave loop circuits and normal-temperature-bonded SAW devices — foundational mechanical and materials solutions that later filings still cite. High citation count marks influence built up over years, not necessarily current commercial relevance.
Collaboration is rare and mostly intra-group
Only ten co-assignee pairings appear across 6,529 families, and the strongest pairing — corporate affiliates filing jointly — accounts for 121 records on its own. Outside a few such internal groupings, most filings in this space are single-assignee, suggesting cross-company joint filing is not a common strategy here.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to rf acoustic filter landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is active, and where the activity has stalled
Recent-year momentum data shows a field where even the most historically active assignees have slowed to near-zero new publications in the latest window — consistent with the broader flat-to-declining filing trend rather than any single company's retreat.
Leading filers show flat or negative momentum
The assignee with the most recent-year activity recorded just one publication with 0% year-over-year change; several other historically prominent filers show zero publications in the latest year, and at least one shows a -100% YoY swing. This matches the dataset-wide plateau rather than indicating any one company exiting the technology.
Corporate affiliates file jointly at scale
The strongest co-assignee pairing in the dataset links a parent and its component subsidiary, filing 121 records together — far ahead of the next pairings at 12 and 11. This is the clearest evidence of structured, sustained joint filing in the dataset, rather than incidental co-invention.
Japanese entities anchor the filing base
The receiving-office skew toward Japan lines up with the concentration of Japanese corporate names among top assignees and co-filers. Any competitive-intelligence review of this space needs Japanese-assignee tracking as a first-order input, not a secondary check.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. | 1 | 0% |
| Panasonic Corporation (Japan) | 0 | — |
| Fujitsu Limited | 0 | — |
| Fujitsu Media Devices Limited | 0 | — |
| Skyworks Solutions, Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| Toyo Communication Equipment Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Kyocera Corporation | 0 | — |
| Toshiba Corporation | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a mature, geographically concentrated filing landscape with narrow bands of under-claimed integration work. The next steps depend on whether the goal is freedom-to-operate clearance, competitive tracking, or identifying a defensible filing position.
Run a freedom-to-operate check on hybrid stacks
The BAW-on-SAW hybrid structure exemplified in the representative filing sits at the boundary of two dense claim clusters. Before designing a similar stack, map the specific claim language around temperature-compensation layers and air-cavity geometry.
Search this claim space in EurekaTrack Japanese-origin filings directly
With Japan the largest single receiving office and Japanese corporate names dominant among top assignees and co-filers, a monitoring workflow limited to US and EPO sources will miss the majority of new activity in this field.
Set up assignee tracking in EurekaTest claim novelty against the under-claimed branches
Filter-bank packaging, waveguide-coupled front-end elements and amplifier-filter co-design show materially lower filing density than the core resonator structure classes, making them worth a targeted novelty search before committing R&D spend elsewhere.
Explore white space in EurekaCommon questions about RF acoustic filter patents
The dataset shows filing concentrated among a mix of large Japanese electronics manufacturers and US-based RF component suppliers, with corporate affiliate groups (a parent company and its component-manufacturing subsidiary) often filing under closely related but separate assignee names. Rather than a single dominant leader, the picture is one of several well-established players holding overlapping claim territory, reinforced by co-assignee filing between affiliated entities. Recent-year momentum data shows even the most active historical filers publishing few or zero new families in the latest window, so current leadership by volume does not necessarily indicate current filing intensity. Anyone assessing market position should weight cumulative family count against recent-year activity separately.
No — the filing trend peaked at 254 published families in 2022, up from 126 in 2017, and has not exceeded that level since. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the low 2026 figure partly reflects filings still working through the pipeline rather than a hard stop in R&D activity, but the multi-year plateau before that is a real signal. Practically, this means the core BAW and SAW resonator structure claim space is mature and well-occupied rather than in an early land-grab phase. New filing activity is more likely to succeed in adjacent integration areas than in the core resonator structures themselves.
Both technologies fall under the same core IPC classification (H03H) in this dataset, and many filings — including the representative filing analysed here — combine elements of both in a single hybrid device. SAW-related claims tend to center on interdigital transducer electrodes and piezoelectric layer propagation, while BAW-related claims more often address resonator cavity structure and acoustic mirror design. The most-cited records in the dataset include foundational patents from both categories, indicating that neither approach has fully displaced the other and that hybrid integration is an active area of claim activity.
Japan is the largest single receiving office in this dataset at 2,055 records, ahead of the United States at 1,495, China at 1,029, the European Patent Office at 665 and South Korea at 520. This distribution reflects the historical strength of Japanese electronics manufacturers in piezoelectric materials and RF component manufacturing. A competitive or freedom-to-operate review limited to US and European sources would miss the majority of filings in this technology.
The core resonator structure claims under H03H are heavily filed, but density drops off notably in adjacent classes such as filter-bank packaging (H05K), waveguide-coupled front-end elements (H01P) and amplifier-filter co-design overlapping H03F. These lower-density branches are where a first claim is more likely to clear prior art, though a formal novelty search against the specific claim language in each branch is still necessary before relying on that gap. Hybrid BAW-on-SAW integration, as seen in the representative filing, is another area where claim density is lower than in either single-technology structure alone.
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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.