Yole Développement announces its 2.5D, 3DIC and TSV Interconnect Patent Investigation report. Yole Développement’s investigation aims at providing statistical analysis of existing IP to give a landscape overview together with an in-depth investigation on 5 player portfolios selected by the analyst. Also, don’t miss the patent ranking and detailed analysis of the key patents.
A very young patent landscape dominated by 10 companies…
For this analysis of 3D packaging technology patents, more than 1800 patent families have been screened. 52% of the families have been classified as relevant and further studied. “The indepth analysis quickly revealed that the overall patent landscape was pretty young with 82% of patents filed since 2006. Actually about 260 players are involved in 3DIC technology while the top 10 assignees represents 48% of patents filed in the 3DIC domain!,” explains Lionel Cadix, Technology & Market Analyst, Advanced Packaging, at Yole Développement.
Yole Développement selected 5 companies from these 10 most active players to focus on and lead an accurate analysis of their patent portfolios.
The report also provides a database of all the relevant patents Yole Développement’s analyst has analyzed in an Excel file which allows multi-criteria searching. The criteria are basically those the company used for the technological segmentation:
- Patent information
> Patent publication number
> Link to the PDF document
> Oldest priority date
> Title
> Assignee
> Patent potential ranking
> Nb of citing patent families
- Technological segmentation
> Design
> Process: lithography, etching, metallization, passivation, filling, repassivation, UBM, bonding, thinning
> Test
> Architecture
- End Application mentioned
> Memory
> Interposer
> Logic Sip / SoC
Yole Développement found 4 main types of business models among the top 10 assignees involved in this mutating middle end area:
- Foundries and IDM: IBM, Samsung, Intel
- OSATs: STATS ChipPAC, Amkor
- Memory IDM/Foundries: Micron, SK Hynix, Elpida
- Research centers: ITRI
It is also interesting to notice that the USA is the early player increasingly involved in 3DIC since 1969. China and Korea are new players since 2005.
This complete description of the patent landscape is included in the first part of the report and provides all the background materials for the 3DIC patent landscape analysis. The report provides a complete analysis of the patent landscape including geographical origins of the patents, companies or R&D organizations that have been granted the patents, historical data on when the companies that have applied for patents in the last 20 years, inventors of the patents, expiration status, R&D collaborations…
Understanding the patent portfolio of the top 10 3DIC assignees
The report provides a deep dive into each of the patent portfolios of assignees selected by Yole Développement, including Intel, Samsung, Micron, IBM and TSMC.
For each of these companies, the report provides an in-depth analysis of its patent portfolio, highlighting the following points:
- Company patent portfolio evolution
- Countries of deposition and origin of the patents
- Top inventors
- Technical segmentation of each patent portfolio
- Patent portfolio analysis for each manufacturing process steps and architecture
- Main technical innovations
This analysis of each company provides an in-depth view of the strengths and weaknesses of the patent portfolio of each company and the developments that are now implemented by these companies.
An overall patent ranking to identify the most promising patents.
A ranking of the most important patents is provided in this report to highlight the most promising. Other information includes: which of all the analyzed documents could be blocking, which company owns which patents and the contents of each patent. The ranking is based on a unique methodology which has been developed by Yole Développement and is based on the evaluation of 14 parameters:
- Description
- Independent claims
- Life expected
- Applicant type
- Innovation intensity of application field
- Market size
- Geographical application
- Legal status
- Geographical protection
- Competitor type
- Technology infringement capability
- Innovation type
- Application filed
These parameters enable patent potential to be evaluated through 4 dimensions. The final patent potential is the average of scores for each parameter. A score between 1 and 10 is thus calculated for each dimension and for the global patent potential.
Methodology of the analysis
Based on requests on micropatent, and several other databases, Yole Développement has developed a unique methodology (described in the sample) to define a technical segmentation of the patent landscape, define which patents are the most innovative, either for future use or already in production. Yole Développement, by mixing its technical knowledge, business understanding and patent search, is able to provide unique analysis and added value in this report.
For more information visit www.yole.fr.
Filed Under: Rapid prototyping