Which companies are protecting their lead-free soldering ideas?
Lead-free soldering has been a hot topic over the last few years. With government mandates forcing the issue, there is a lot of money to be made (and lost) in the lead-free solder arena. Plenty of companies have jumped into the ring offering solutions to the challenges presented by lead-free soldering.
When a company and/or inventor think they have a valuable solution to a problem they often pursue a patent to protect their intellectual property (IP). This article will take a brief look at the landscape of U.S. patent publications related to lead-free soldering.
To get a data set of patent publications related to lead-free soldering, I searched U.S. patents and U.S. patent publications (published patent applications) in a commercial patent database with the terms ((lead or pb) NEAR8 free NEAR8 solder*) in the title. Searching with this one combination of search terms won’t get every last document related to lead-free soldering but it should give us an idea of what is happening in the field.
After capturing the data, I then reduced the data set to one member per patent family to eliminate replication (for example, an issued patent and its corresponding patent publication/application both being in the data set). The search covered the dates 1836 to January 16, 2007.
The data set ended up containing a total of 139 U.S. patent documents related to lead-free soldering. Figure 1 shows the number of patent applications each year from the earliest year in the study, 1987, to the latest, 2006. Since the U.S. Patent Office does not publish patent applications until 18 months after filing, publication years 2005 and 2006 cannot be fully represented as of the date of this article (this is likely why the year 2006 has such a low count). Figure 1 shows steady activity in the field from 2001 to roughly the present time.
Figure 1. U.S. Patent Applications Related to Lead-Free Soldering From 1836 to January 16, 2007.
Investigating the primary inventors on patent publications can give insight into the top inventive minds in the field. Figure 2 shows the inventors with the most patent documents in the field along with their associated assignee (company).
Figure 2. Inventors with the highest number of U.S. patents/publications related to lead-free soldering.
Investigating the assignees on the patent documents in a particular field can give you insight into who is working in the areas that are giving you challenges. Figure 3 shows the top assignees with the most patent documents related to lead-free soldering. IBM is the leader in quantity followed distantly by Hitachi. Overall there are 53 different applicant assignees with 45 patent documents unassigned (at least at the time of the application. Of course, patent assignments often change after the application is filed but the applicant assignees give you insight into who is doing the actual work.
Figure 3. Assignee with the highest number of U.S. patents/publications related to lead-free soldering.
It is also useful to see when the leading companies were active. Figure 4 shows a 3-dimensional graph of the top assignees with the number of documents per year. For example, you can see from this document that Lucent, Ford, and Mitsui Mining & Smelting were all active in the mid-1990s but do not have any activity after that period.
Figure 4. Number of documents per year for the top assignees with U.S. patent documents related to lead-free soldering across all categories.
In order to see where the research efforts have been directed, it can be useful to categorize the patent documents into a technical category. For this study, I simply categorized everything into Lead-Free Composition, Method, or Other. Figure 5 shows the quantity of documents in each category. By far, most patents relate to lead-free compositions.
Figure 5. Number of documents per technical category for U.S. patent documents related to lead-free soldering across all filing years.
Figure 6 shows the number of patent documents per technical category for each of the top assignees. Each of the top assignees has at least one patent document in the lead-free composition technical category. IBM has the most patent documents in each technical category.
Figure 6. Number of documents per technical category for the top assignees with U.S. patent documents related to lead-free soldering across all filing years.
This article has shown that there are many different companies active in the lead-free solder area and they are protecting their ideas via patenting. Since 2001 there has been a steady amount of U.S. patent applications filed related to the lead-free soldering area. Most of the patent documents relate to lead-free compositions.
Danny R. Graves is a freelance patent analyst; You can email Danny by clicking
here.
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