Vacuum Measurement Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
Vacuum Measurement and Leak Detection Patents
Concentrated at the top. The five most active filers hold 30.7% of all 1,009 records in scope, and the top ten hold 39.8% — a small group controls a large share of claim space. Filings rose to a peak of 38 records in 2019, then declined; 2021's 26 records fell to 6 by 2024, a 77% drop over that three-year window. 2025 and 2026 figures will rise as publication catches up with filing, roughly an 18-month lag.
- 1MKS INSTR INC12.1%
- 2SIO2 MEDICAL PRODUCTS INC9.9%
- 3AGILENT TECHNOLOGIES INC4.1%
- 4VARIAN MEDICAL SYSTEMS INC2.4%
- 5BROOKS AUTOMATION INC2.3%
See the full vacuum measurement and leak detection 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
Common questions on this landscape
Who holds the most patents in vacuum measurement and leak detection?
One assignee leads the ranking with 122 records, well ahead of the fifth-ranked filer at 23 and the tenth-ranked filer at 18. The top five filers combined hold 30.7% of all 1,009 records in scope, and the top ten hold 39.8%, so filing activity is concentrated in a small group of instrumentation and semiconductor equipment makers rather than spread evenly. Beyond that group, the ranking includes 100 companies with a long tail of smaller, often single-filing entrants.
Is patent filing in vacuum leak detection increasing or decreasing?
Filings peaked at 38 records in 2019 and have declined since, falling from 26 records in 2021 to 6 in 2024 — a 77% drop over that three-year span. However, publication typically lags filing by about 18 months, so the 2025 and 2026 figures in any dataset are understated and should not yet be read as a continued decline. The most reliable read is that activity cooled after 2019 through the last complete filing year, 2024.
What is the difference between an ionization gauge and a helium leak detector in these patents?
Ionization gauges measure absolute vacuum pressure by ionizing residual gas and reading the resulting current, and they appear heavily in the G01L and H01J classes that dominate this dataset. Helium leak detectors instead identify the location and rate of a specific leak by tracing helium tracer gas, often using a sniffer probe or mass-spectrometer-based residual gas analyzer. Many records in this landscape combine both functions, such as calibration schemes that use an ionization gauge’s on/off states to correct for temperature-driven measurement drift.
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 Vacuum Measurement and Leak Detection covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. 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.