Filings rose from 92 in 2017 to a peak of 239 in 2018, then declined through the following years, reaching 51 by 2022 and just 5 in the most recent tracked year. That decline should not be read as a dying technology — publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the last one to two years are always undercounted. The clear signal is that the core claim space around VCSEL arrays and chip-scale integration was staked out earliest and most heavily between 2017 and 2019, and activity has been thinning since.

The United States leads with 653 records, followed by the European Patent Office at 240, China at 206, WIPO/PCT filings at 176, Japan at 60 and South Korea at 47. This spread indicates the technology is filed as a global portfolio strategy rather than concentrated in one jurisdiction, with the US and Europe together accounting for the largest share of protection sought. Anyone clearing freedom-to-operate needs to check all three of the US, EPO and China filings, since a clean US search alone will miss over 600 other family members.

Parts of it are. The dominant IPC overlaps — G02B optical systems and G01S positioning/ranging — are the most densely filed, meaning multibeam array and structured-light claims there face heavy prior art. Thinner overlaps such as G01B (dimensional measurement, 44 records) and the H10P bucket (32 records) show far less claim density, and recent-year momentum data shows most named assignees have gone quiet, which together suggest room to file narrowly-targeted claims in those adjacent applications rather than in the crowded core.

The assignee ranking (rendered separately on this page) is long-tailed rather than concentrated among a handful of dominant filers, with a small number of co-assignee relationships — for example between Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Royal Philips) and its affiliated entities — showing coordinated multi-entity filing. Recent-year momentum data shows most previously active assignees, including Lumentum Operations LLC and Finisar Corporation, recorded zero filings in the latest tracked year, while only one tracked assignee, TRUMPF Photonic Components GmbH, still shows a single active filing. That pattern points to a field where early leaders have largely stopped adding to their portfolios.

US12266908B2, granted 2025-04-01 to MICROCHIP TECHNOLOGY CALDICOT LIMITED, claims a multiple-wavelength VCSEL array paired with upstream collimating optics feeding a shared vapor cell — a design aimed at atomic-sensing applications such as clocks or magnetometers. It does not block multi-wavelength arrays generally; the vapor-cell recipient and shared collimation path are the limiting features. Anyone building a dual-wavelength VCSEL source for a non-vapor-cell target, or routing each wavelength through separate optical paths, sits outside this specific claim, though a full clearance search is still advisable given how recently it granted.