SCADA and Supervisory Control Patents: Who Leads and Where Filing Is Slowing
52.0% concentration. The top 5 assignees hold 52.0% of the 14,878 records in scope, with the leader alone accounting for 6,010 of them. Filings rose to a peak of 896 in 2020, then filing volume fell from 809 in 2021 to 478 in 2024, a 41% decline over that three-year span. 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in as publications catch up with filing dates, so they should not be read as a continued decline on their own.
- 1ASML NETHERLANDS BV40.4%
- 2KK TOSHIBA3.5%
- 3ASML HLDG NV3.0%
- 4HITACHI LTD2.9%
- 5PANASONIC ELECTRIC WORKS CO LTD2.2%
See the full scada & supervisory systems patent landscape analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Frequently asked questions
Who holds the most SCADA and supervisory control patents?
Filing in this dataset is concentrated at the top: the leading assignee alone accounts for 6,010 of the 14,878 records in scope, and the top 5 assignees combined hold 52.0% of all records. The leader's portfolio is weighted heavily toward lithographic metrology and substrate-measurement technology rather than plant-floor SCADA logic in the narrow industrial sense, so readers focused specifically on process-control SCADA should look past the raw ranking to the IPC composition for context. The ranking itself covers 100 companies and is not a top-50 or top-100 cutoff — it is the full list the dataset returns.
Is patent filing in SCADA and supervisory systems growing or shrinking?
Filings peaked in 2020 at 896 and fell from 809 in 2021 to 478 in 2024, a 41% drop over that three-year window. That said, publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so 2025 and 2026 figures in the trend line are still incomplete and should not be read as evidence the field itself is winding down. The safest read is that filing activity cooled through the early 2020s relative to its 2020 peak, based on the years for which the data is complete.
What technology areas get the most patent coverage in this field?
Photolithography and photomechanics (G03F) is the single largest classification, touching 36.3% of the 14,878 records in scope, reflecting how much of this corpus intersects with semiconductor manufacturing metrology rather than generic industrial control. Control and regulating systems (G05B) at 11.1% and electric digital data processing (G06F) at 10.3% are the next largest clusters, followed closely by material analysis and testing (G01N) at 10.0%. Because a single record can carry several IPC classes, these percentages overlap and should not be summed.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on SCADA & Supervisory Systems Patent Landscape covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-08-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.