The ranking covers 100 assignees, led by a single company with 514 records, well ahead of fifth place at 131 and tenth place at 84. The top 5 combined hold 19.4% of all 7,394 records in scope, and the top 10 combined hold 27.2%. That leaves the majority of filings spread across a long tail of companies and universities each holding a small number of records, so no single company dominates the field outright.

Filing rose from 230 records in 2017 to a peak of 275 in 2020, then declined to 217 in 2021 and 158 in 2024 — a -27% change over that three-year span. Figures for 2025 and 2026 are lower still, but publication typically lags filing by about 18 months, so those most recent years are undercounted and should not be read as a continuing decline until later data fills in.

Adhesives (C09J) lead at 15.5% of the 7,394 records, followed by coatings, paints and inks (C09D) at 13.8%, coating and surface deposition (C23C) at 13.1%, and layered products and laminates (B32B) at 11.8%. Medicinal preparations, coating processes, semiconductor devices and condensation polymers each carry meaningful but smaller shares. Because records often carry multiple IPC classes, these percentages overlap rather than sum to 100%.

US11843105B2, assigned to Carnegie Mellon University, claims a chemical vapor deposition method for applying a conformal organic polymer interfacial layer — including PEDOT — to a lithium-ion cathode active material. Anyone using CVD to apply a uniform organic polymer coating to cathode particles for interfacial protection should review this claim closely, since it sits at the intersection of the C23C deposition and battery electrode surface engineering space this landscape tracks. Design-around options generally involve different deposition methods (e.g. atomic layer deposition) or non-conformal, patterned coatings rather than a uniform interfacial layer.

Based on the IPC composition, branches adjacent to the dense adhesive and coating classes — such as battery electrode interfacial coatings, biodegradable adhesive bonding, and tribological coatings for semiconductor tooling — show thinner relative representation than the core C09J and C09D classes. This is a starting signal from class-level density, not a full clearance search; confirming true white space requires checking full claim text against the specific chemistry or process route intended for filing.

The dataset includes both large industrial filers and academic institutions among its ranked assignees, with a small cluster of co-assignee research partnerships — 10 pairs total, the strongest linking a Brussels-based university, a biotechnology research institute, and a US university, sharing well over 100 records between pairs. This academic collaboration pattern is distinct from the corporate volume leaders, suggesting two separate filing dynamics operating within the same technology space.