Fastest
Eureka on the web
When you want the answer in the next five minutes.
The agent works the prompt against patents and technical literature, citing every source.
Run your analysis now →https://www.patsnap.com/resources/blog/rd-blog/topcon-solar-cell-advanced-materials-patent-landscape/ · Patsnap · data cut-off 2026-07-31 · downloaded from the live page
Patent Landscape 2026TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials Patent Landscape
- 361 patent families filed since 2015, with filings peaking at 102 in 2023 before flattening — the 2022 midpoint of 70 shows growth had already slowed before the peak.
- China holds the claim base, with 309 of the tracked records filed through its receiving office against just 16 via WIPO (PCT) and 8 in the US.
- Claims cluster tightly in H01L, the semiconductor-device subclass touching all 361 families, while adjacent branches like B82Y (4 records) and B08B (3 records) remain largely unclaimed.
361
Published Records
59%
Top-5 Share of Top-100 Filers
+52%
3-Yr Growth (lag-adjusted)
CN
Leading Jurisdiction
Published byPatsnap Research··7 min readSourced from Patsnap Eureka
Field Overview
What's actually being claimed here
TOPCon (tunnel oxide passivated contact) filings claim a specific cell architecture: a thin tunnelling oxide between the silicon substrate and a doped polysilicon contact layer, designed to cut recombination losses at the electrode interface. This dataset isolates that architecture using IPC codes for polysilicon contacts, tunnel oxides, passivation layers and transparent conductive oxides, so the 361 families here are the advanced-materials layer of TOPCon — not the wider cell-manufacturing or module-assembly patent base.
Filing is heavily anchored in China's receiving office and in the H01L semiconductor-device subclass, with the curve peaking in 2023 before flattening. That combination — geographic concentration plus a single dominant IPC subclass — is the pattern of a claim space that filled in quickly once the architecture proved commercially viable, leaving thinner adjacent branches as the more open ground for new filings.
Filing trend and IPC composition, 2015–2026
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Assignee ranking and totals. Derived from a Patsnap search on TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
Let an AI agent run this analysis on your own technology
Pick a task. Every answer cites the patents behind it.
20,000 free credits to start
Filing Data
How the TOPCon claim space has grown
The trend and technology split below are drawn from 361 patent families published between 2015 and the July 2026 cut-off. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the final year or two will always look thinner than it eventually turns out to be.
Filing activity, 2017–2026
Filings rose from a single record in 2017 to a peak of 102 in 2023, with the 2022 midpoint at 70 — growth had already flattened before the peak, and the partial 2026 count reflects the publication lag rather than a real slowdown.
Where the claims sit across IPC subclasses
H01L (semiconductor devices) anchors the field with all 361 records touching it; the next largest branch, H01B (cables, conductors & insulators), sits at 34 — a steep drop that shows how tightly this corpus is centred on the core cell architecture rather than spread across adjacent hardware.
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.
Go deeper on TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about topcon solar cell advanced materials and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative Filing
A recent claim worth reading in full
Representative Record
TOPCon SOLAR CELL AND METHOD FOR MANUFACTURING THE SAME
RESEARCH & BUSINESS FOUNDATION SUNGKYUNKWAN UNIVERSITY
A Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact (TOPCon) solar cell, and a method therefor are provided. The TOPCon solar cell includes: a silicon substrate; a tunneling layer formed on a surface of the silicon substrate; a polycrystalline silicon layer formed on a surface of the tunneling layer; a polycrystalline germanium layer formed on a surface of the polycrystalline silicon layer; a lower passivation layer formed on a surface of the polycrystalline germanium layer; and a lower electrode formed on the lower passivation layer and electrically connected to the polycrystalline germanium layer.Filed by Sungkyunkwan University's Research & Business Foundation, published 2025-02-06 — one of only 8 US-filed records in this corpus.
Most-cited records in this corpus
| # | Patent | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 一种隧穿氧化层钝化接触太阳能电池及其制备方法 | 61 |
| 2 | 一种激光硼掺杂选择性发射极TOPCon结构电池及其制备方法 | 57 |
| 3 | 一种具有双面铝浆电极的N型Topcon电池及其制备方法 | 36 |
| 4 | 用于Topcon电池制作的poly-Si绕镀的去除方法 | 34 |
| 5 | 一种TOPCon太阳能电池及制造方法 | 31 |
| 6 | Topcon结构太阳能电池的制备方法 | 22 |
| 7 | 电池背面结构及双面TOPCon太阳能电池 | 21 |
| 8 | 具有空穴选择钝化结构的晶硅/钙钛矿叠层太阳电池 | 20 |
| 9 | 一种TOPCon电池及其制作方法 | 19 |
| 10 | 一种叠层太阳电池及其制备方法 | 18 |
Ranked by citation count within the searched corpus; older filings are structurally favoured, so treat this as a map of influence rather than of current commercial importance.
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Citation counts and representative records. Derived from a Patsnap search on TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
Run it yourself
Put your own technology through the same analysis
Where to run it
For builders
MCP server & REST API
When it has to run inside your own pipeline.
Patent search, landscape analysis and assignee resolution as MCP tools. Drop them into any agent framework, or call REST directly.
Browse MCP servers →Signal Check
What the filing pattern actually tells you
Read together, the trend curve, the IPC split and the citation table point to a field whose core architecture is already fenced in, with the remaining opportunity sitting in narrow process branches rather than the cell structure itself.
Trend
102 in 2023
peak filing year
Growth plateaued before the peak
Filings rose from a single record in 2017 to 102 in 2023, but the 2022 midpoint of 70 shows the climb had already lost momentum before that peak — this is a maturing claim space, not one still accelerating.
Midpoint 2022 vs peak 2023
Composition
361 vs 34
H01L vs H01B record counts
Claims sit almost entirely in one subclass
Every one of the 361 families touches H01L (semiconductor devices); the next largest subclass, H01B (cables, conductors & insulators), holds only 34. The drop-off shows how narrowly this corpus is scoped to the cell architecture itself.
IPC subclass distribution
Geography
309 of 361
records via China receiving office
Filing is overwhelmingly domestic
China's receiving office accounts for 309 records against 16 via WIPO (PCT), 8 in the US, and single-digit counts elsewhere. International filing is a thin layer on top of a domestically-anchored claim base.
Receiving-office split
Influence
61 citations
top-cited record
Citation weight sits with early structural claims
The most-cited record — a general tunnel-oxide passivated contact cell — carries 61 citations, ahead of a laser-doped selective-emitter variant at 57. Both predate the 2023 peak, consistent with older filings accumulating more citations inside a searched corpus.
Most-cited records table
Eureka AI Agent
Looking for what nobody has claimed yet?
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to topcon solar cell advanced materials, with the prior art for and against each one.
Co-filing is concentrated in a handful of pairs
| Assignee | Co-assignee | Shared families |
|---|---|---|
| Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. | State Power Investment Corporation Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. | 17 |
| Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. | Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. Xi'an Solar Power Branch | 14 |
| Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. | Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. Xining Solar Power Branch | 14 |
| State Power Investment Corporation Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. | Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. Xi'an Solar Power Branch | 14 |
| State Power Investment Corporation Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. | Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. Xining Solar Power Branch | 14 |
| Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. Xi'an Solar Power Branch | Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. Xining Solar Power Branch | 14 |
| Chint New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. | Zhejiang Chint Solar Technology Co., Ltd. | 4 |
| Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. | Huanghe Hydropower Xining Solar Power Co., Ltd. | 3 |
Only 10 co-assignee pairs are documented in this corpus, and the strongest — 青海黄河上游水电开发有限责任公司 with its state-power affiliate — shares 17 filings. That concentration suggests joint filing here is a function of corporate structure (parent/subsidiary and regional power-affiliate ties) rather than open cross-company collaboration.
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Co-assignee relationships and derived observations. Derived from a Patsnap search on TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
Competitive Landscape
Who holds the claim space, and where it's still open
Assignee activity clusters around Chinese cell manufacturers and their affiliated power-generation groups, with co-filing driven largely by corporate and regional ties rather than cross-company collaboration. Recent-year momentum figures should be read against the 18-month publication lag before concluding anyone has stopped filing.
Manufacturer cluster
0 latest-year
filings recorded for top assignees
Leading filers show no recent-year activity — read with caution
天合光能股份有限公司 (Trina Solar), 滁州捷泰新能源科技有限公司 and 韩华新能源(启东)有限公司 all show 0 filings in the latest tracked year. Given the field's 2023 peak and the known publication lag, this is more likely a reporting gap than a real pullback.
Recent-year momentum data
State-affiliated group
17 shared filings
strongest co-assignee pair
Power-generation affiliates file jointly, not competitively
青海黄河上游水电开发有限责任公司 and its state-power affiliate 国家电投集团黄河上游水电开发有限责任公司 share 17 filings — the strongest of only 10 documented co-assignee pairs, pointing to internal group filing rather than open partnership.
Co-assignee pair analysis
International entrant
8 of 361
records filed in the US
Non-Chinese filers are a small, distinct minority
With only 8 US records, 6 UK, and 6 EPO filings against 309 in China, non-Chinese assignees such as Sungkyunkwan University's Research & Business Foundation represent a narrow but technically distinct slice of this corpus, often targeting specific layer variants rather than the base architecture.
Receiving-office split
Recent-year filing momentum by assignee
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Chuzhou JA Solar New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Trina Solar Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| State Power Investment Corporation Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Chint New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Hanwha New Energy (Qidong) Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. Xi'an Solar Power Branch | 0 | — |
| Qinghai Huanghe Upstream Hydropower Development Co., Ltd. Xining Solar Power Branch | 0 | — |
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Assignee-level momentum. Derived from a Patsnap search on TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
Next Steps
Where to take this analysis next
The dataset points to where claims are dense and where they thin out. Turning that into a filing or freedom-to-operate decision means checking your own architecture against the specific layer and process claims that carry the most citation weight.
Check your cell stack against the most-cited claims
The top two most-cited records define the vocabulary the rest of the field builds on. Before filing a new claim, confirm whether your layer sequence overlaps with either.
Compare claim scope in EurekaExplore the under-claimed process branches
B82Y, B08B and C23C carry a fraction of the H01L record count. That gap is worth a manual verification pass before assuming it's genuinely open.
Search white space in EurekaSource: Patsnap Eureka. Forward-looking reading of the same dataset. Derived from a Patsnap search on TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
Common Questions
Frequently asked questions
TOPCon (tunnel oxide passivated contact) is a cell architecture that inserts a thin tunnelling oxide layer and a doped polycrystalline silicon layer between the silicon substrate and the electrode, reducing recombination losses at the contact. It has become one of the dominant mass-production cell designs, which is why filing activity rose sharply through the early 2020s and peaked at 102 families in 2023. The concentration of claims around H01L (semiconductor devices) reflects how central the layer stack itself is to the competitive filing activity, rather than peripheral equipment or materials.
Filing is concentrated among Chinese cell manufacturers and their affiliated power-generation groups, with dense co-assignee pairing between entities such as 青海黄河上游水电开发有限责任公司 and its state-power affiliate. Receiving-office data shows China accounts for 309 of the tracked records, dwarfing the next largest office, WIPO (PCT), at 16. That concentration means most of the enforceable claim density sits in Chinese filings, with only a thin layer of international (PCT, US, EPO) coverage.
The thinnest IPC branches relative to the 361-family H01L core are B82Y (nanotechnology applications, 4 records) and B08B (general cleaning, 3 records), followed by C23C (coating and deposition, 10 records). These small counts suggest under-claimed process steps — particularly around poly-Si removal, cleaning and deposition process parameters — rather than the general cell architecture, which is heavily claimed already. Any first filing there should still be checked against the most-cited structural patents before assuming the space is genuinely open.
Not necessarily. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the low counts recorded for 2025 and 2026 understate real filing activity rather than proving a slowdown. The more reliable signal is the plateau visible between the 2022 midpoint (70) and the 2023 peak (102): growth had already flattened before the most recent, still-incomplete years. Recent-year momentum readings of 0 across the leading assignees are consistent with this lag, not with those companies having stopped filing.
The patent, filed by Sungkyunkwan University's Research & Business Foundation and published 2025-02-06, claims a specific layer sequence that inserts a polycrystalline germanium layer between the poly-Si contact and the passivation/electrode stack. It does not claim the base tunnel-oxide/poly-Si structure, which is prior art across the wider dataset — only the poly-Ge insertion step. Companies filing or selling in the US should check whether their stack includes that specific intermediate germanium layer before assuming freedom to operate.
Answers are grounded in the same dataset. Derived from a Patsnap search on TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
Research TOPCon Solar Cell Advanced Materials in depth with Eureka
Go past this page: query the whole topcon solar cell advanced materials corpus yourself, in your own scope.
Every answer comes back with patent numbers you can open.
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.