Solid-State Circuit Breaker Patents: Leaders & Filing Trends 2026
- Filing peaked in 2019 at 15 records and has not recovered, with the 2022 midpoint at just 3, pointing to a flat-to-declining rather than emerging field.
- Switching hardware and protection logic dominate the claim space — 44 records in H01H and 33 in H02H, while power conversion integration sits at only 2 records.
- Ownership is fragmented, not concentrated — the strongest co-assignee link across 58 families is only two shared records.
A field that filed hard once and has not repeated it
Solid-state circuit breakers replace or augment mechanical contacts with semiconductor switching to cut interruption times, a property that matters most in DC microgrid protection and other applications where a few milliseconds of fault current can damage sensitive equipment. The 58 patent families tracked here span 2015 through a partial 2026, filed under IPC classes covering switches (H01H), protective circuitry (H02H) and pulse-technique logic (H03K). Filing rose to a peak of 15 records in 2019 and has since fallen back, with the 2022 midpoint at just 3 records — a pattern more consistent with a technology that had an early wave of claiming than one still building momentum.
Ownership is fragmented: the strongest co-assignee link across all 58 families is only two shared records, and receiving-office data shows the United States, Europe and India carrying most of the filing weight. That combination — dense hardware claims, thin conversion-integration claims, and low collaborative filing — sets up the rest of this landscape.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Fifty-eight families span 2015 through the partial 2026 year, with filing activity concentrated in the second half of the last decade rather than building toward the present.
A 2019 peak that has not been repeated
Annual filings rose to 15 in 2019, then fell back; the 2022 midpoint of 3 confirms the trend is flat to declining rather than recovering, and the most recent year is understated by the usual 18-month publication lag.
Switching hardware dominates over protection logic
H01H (switches and relays) carries 44 of the 58 records and H02H (protective circuit arrangements) carries 33, with H03K pulse-technique claims at 12. Everything else — power conversion, measurement, lighting, resistors, semiconductor devices — sits at 1-2 records each, marking those as thin, largely unclaimed adjacencies.
Shares are the percentage of the 58 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Solid-State Circuit Breakers with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about solid-state circuit breakers and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe records anchoring this landscape
Method and apparatus for controlling solid state circuit breaker, and solid state circuit breaker
A method for controlling a solid state circuit breaker includes detecting a direction of a current flowing through the solid state circuit breaker, obtaining a breaking current value according to that direction, obtaining a maximum threshold current, predicting the current value within the next sampling period, comparing that predicted value against the breaking current value, and delaying the solid state circuit breaker when the prediction exceeds the threshold.Filed by Siemens Aktiengesellschaft, published 2022-05-19 — claims predictive, direction-aware trip-delay logic rather than a specific switch hardware configuration.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US5463252A | Modular solid state relay | 60 |
| 2 | US6104106A | Solid state circuit breaker | 32 |
| 3 | WO2011044928A1 | A hybrid circuit breaker | 27 |
| 4 | US8503138B2 | Hybrid circuit breaker | 21 |
| 5 | US20200211803A1 | Hazardous location compliant circuit protection devices, systems and methods with safety lockout/tagout compo… | 16 |
| 6 | CA2100281C | Solid state circuit breaker | 6 |
| 7 | US20250316977A1 | Series type hybrid circuit breaker with non-resonant current zero-crossing generation | 2 |
| 8 | US20240388080A1 | Solid state circuit breaker and control method therefor | 2 |
| 9 | US11888312B2 | Solid state circuit breaker with reduced clamping voltage | 2 |
| 10 | US11456142B2 | Hazardous location compliant circuit protection devices, systems and methods with safety lockout/tagout compo… | 2 |
Ranked by citation count within this search corpus; older records accumulate citations simply by being available longer, so treat this as an influence signal rather than a current-activity signal.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the filing data actually shows
Three patterns stand out once the raw counts are normalised to patent families: a stalled filing trend, a lopsided technology mix, and thin cross-assignee collaboration.
Growth is flat, not building
Annual filings hit 15 in 2019 and had fallen to 3 by the 2022 midpoint. That is a decline within the tracked window, not the ramp-up pattern seen in fields still attracting new capital, though the most recent one to two years will read low regardless due to publication lag.
Hardware claims dwarf conversion integration
Switching and relay hardware (H01H) carries 44 of the 58 records; power conversion integration (H02M) carries only 2. That gap marks where the claim space is dense and where it is nearly empty.
Old art still anchors the field
The most-cited record in this set, US5463252A, dates from well before the 2019 filing peak. Heavy citation on older solid-state relay art signals foundational influence, not that the underlying approach is still the most active filing target.
Filing is mostly solo, not joint
Only four co-assignee pairs appear across the full family set, and the strongest of those shares just two records. Most patent holders in this dataset are filing independently rather than through joint development arrangements.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to solid-state circuit breakers, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the claim space is still open
No single assignee dominates this dataset; the ranking is a long tail of entities with one to a handful of families each, and recent-year momentum shows most of them inactive in the latest tracked year.
A fragmented ownership base
With only four co-assignee pairs across the full dataset and the strongest pair sharing just two records, most filers here are working independently rather than through joint ventures or shared development programmes.
Recent activity has gone quiet
Every assignee listed in the recent-momentum data shows zero filings in the latest tracked year, including entities that filed in prior years. That is consistent with the broader flat-to-declining trend rather than a single company pulling back.
Filing concentrates in three offices
The United States, European Patent Office and India together account for the bulk of receiving-office activity, while China and Canada each show single-digit counts — a gap worth checking against manufacturing footprint before assuming under-filing.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Eaton Intelligent Power Limited | 0 | -100% |
| L&I Research Inc. | 0 | — |
| L&I RESEARCH INC | 0 | — |
| Delta Electronics, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation | 0 | — |
| PARTRIDGE DONALD F | 0 | — |
| ABB (Switzerland) Ltd. | 0 | -100% |
| Siemens Aktiengesellschaft | 0 | — |
Turning this landscape into a filing or design-around decision
The dataset shows where claim density sits and where it does not; the next step is testing a specific claim or design against that map.
Check freedom to operate against the predictive-control claim
US20220158438A1's trip-delay logic is the sharpest claim in this set. Any new controller design should be checked against it before finalising interruption-timing algorithms.
Run a claim chart in EurekaExplore the power-conversion integration gap
H02M-tagged records number just 2 against 44 in switching hardware. A claim combining conversion and breaking functions sits in largely open territory.
Explore white space in EurekaTrack assignee momentum before committing R&D spend
With most tracked assignees at zero filings in the latest year, confirm whether that reflects publication lag or genuine pullback before assuming the field is closing.
Monitor assignee activity in EurekaCommon questions on solid-state circuit breaker patents
A solid-state circuit breaker interrupts current entirely through semiconductor switching elements, with no mechanical contact opening in the current path, which gives it much faster interruption times than an electromechanical breaker. A hybrid circuit breaker combines a mechanical contact for normal conduction (to keep steady-state losses low) with a solid-state path that takes over during a fault to interrupt current quickly. In this dataset, hybrid designs such as WO2011044928A1 and US8503138B2 carry some of the heaviest citation weight, indicating the hybrid approach has been an influential reference point for later filings even though pure solid-state relay lineages like US5463252A remain the most-cited records overall.
The dataset shows filing spread across a number of assignees rather than concentrated in one or two dominant holders, with the strongest co-assignee link being only two records between the same pair of inventors. Siemens appears with the representative record from 2022 covering predictive current-delay control logic. The recent-momentum data shows most tracked assignees at zero filings in the latest year, which is consistent with the broader flat-to-declining trend rather than any single company accelerating ahead of the field.
The available data shows filings rising to 15 in 2019 and falling to 3 by the 2022 midpoint, without a specific documented cause in this evidence set. Filing cycles in protective-switching hardware often track underlying grid infrastructure investment cycles and standards activity, but that link is not established by this dataset alone. Readers should also account for publication lag: since publication trails filing by roughly 18 months, the most recent one to two years in any trend chart will always understate true filing activity.
The technology composition data shows switching hardware (H01H, 44 records) and protective logic (H02H, 33 records) heavily claimed, while power conversion integration (H02M, 2 records) and measurement/sensing tie-in (G01R, 1 record) are barely touched. A first claim combining predictive current sensing with the power conversion stage, rather than treating detection and breaking as separate subsystems, would sit in genuinely thin territory. Geographic filing is also concentrated in the United States, EPO and India, with far fewer records reaching China despite that market's manufacturing scale.
US20220158438A1, filed by Siemens Aktiengesellschaft and published in May 2022, claims a control method that detects current direction, derives a breaking-current threshold, and predicts the next sampling period's current value before deciding whether to delay interruption. This matters because it claims decision logic rather than a specific hardware configuration, so it can potentially read on breaker designs built with different semiconductor technologies if they use a similar predictive-delay trigger. New entrants building fast-interruption logic should check their control algorithm against this claim specifically, separate from whatever switching hardware they use.
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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.
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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.