Pb-free soldering and materials IP: which companies are protecting their Pb-free soldering ideas?

Plenty of money can be made (and lost) in the Pb-free solder arena. Many companies have jumped into the ring, offering solutions to the challenges presented by Pb-free soldering.

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When a company or inventor thinks they have a valuable solution to a problem, they often pursue a patent as a means to protect their ideas. Herein is a brief look at the landscape of U.S. patent publications related to Pb-free soldering.

To get a data set of patent publications related to Pb-free soldering, I searched U.S. patents and U.S. patent publications in a commercial patent database with the terms ((lead or pb) NEAR8 free NEAR8 solder*) in the title. Searching this combination of terms won't return every document related to Pb-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 Jan. 16, 2007.

The resulting data set contained a total of 139 U.S. patent documents related to Pb-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 2006 has such a low count). Based on the data, the field has seen steady activity from 2001 to roughly the present.

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Investigating the primary inventors on patent publications can reveal 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).

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Investigating the assignees on the patent documents in a particular field can give insight into which firms are working on areas giving the industry challenges. Figure 3 shows the assignees with the most patent documents related to Pb-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 provide a glimpse at who is doing the actual work.

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It is also useful to see when the leading companies were active. Figure 4 is a 3-D graph of the top assignees with the number of documents per year. From this, it can be observed that that Lucent, Ford and Mitsui Mining & Smelting were active in the mid '90s but ceased patent activity after that period.

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To see where research efforts have been directed, it can be useful to categorize the patent documents by technical category. For this study, I simply categorized everything into Pb-free Composition, Method or Other. Figure 5 shows the quantity of documents in each category. By far, most patents relate to compositions.

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Figure 6 shows the number of patent documents per technical category for each of the top assignees. Each of them has at least one patent document in the Pb-free composition technical category. IBM has the most patent documents in each technical category.

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Many companies are active in Pb-free soldering, and they are protecting their ideas via patenting. Since 2001, a steady amount of U.S. patent applications have been filed with regard to Pb-free soldering, with most of the patent documents relating to Pb-free compositions.

Danny R. Graves is a freelance patent analyst; [e-mail].