Technology and the Economy: What is Actually Happening?

Live data from 2023-01-01 to March 11, 2026

Humans are excellent storytellers, and we’re inundated with stories about technology, companies, and stocks. Sometimes these stories paint an unbiased picture, but not always. Instead, let’s look at the data and see what stories it tells.

Methodology: 

  1. Collect all the US patents in a rolling 3-year window. 
  2. Count the number of patents issued each day in each of the 255,374 unique CPC subclasses. 
  3. Sort the subclasses by their sizes and growth rates to observe where the most technology innovation is happening, and where there is recent growth. 
  4. Count the patents per owner/assignee within these fast growing domains, and sort them.

Below are some highlights: areas of innovation with the largest and fastest growing volumes of new patents, and recent acceleration where new activity in the last 30 days stands out.

H10K59/80 Construction of organic electric solid-state semiconductors

The majority of patent activity in this domain relates to OLED display architectures. These technologies underpin modern AMOLED displays used in displays, including emerging foldable displays.

H10D30/01 Manufacture of inorganic solid state field-effect transistors

This classification covers manufacturing processes for inorganic field-effect transistors (FETs), the core switching devices used in modern integrated circuits. Innovations typically relate to gate structures, channel geometry, electrode formation, and fabrication techniques at advanced nodes. Patent activity is dominated by leading semiconductor manufacturers such as TSMC and Samsung, reflecting intense competition in logic chip scaling (e.g., FinFET and gate-all-around architectures) driven by demand from AI accelerators, high-performance computing, and advanced mobile processors.

H10D30/67 Thin-film transistors [TFT]

H10D84/01 Manufacture of semiconductor devices from semiconducting layers

H10D62/10 Shapes, relative sizes or dispositions of the regions of the semiconductor bodies; Shapes of the semiconductor bodies

H10D84/03 using Group IV technology, e.g. silicon technology or silicon-carbide [SiC] technology

A61K40/42 Cancer antigens

H04L41/16 using machine learning or artificial intelligence

C12N15/86 Genetic engineering in animal cells via viral vectors

H10D64/01 Manufacture or treatment of electrodes for semiconductor devices

H10F39/00 Semiconductor photodiode arrays and other radiation detectors

Notes and Disclaimers:

Data includes US Patents from 2017 to the present (updated 2x/week). Data is estimated to be more than 99.95% complete, but a small number of very long patents (e.g. including DNA sequences) failed to properly save.

In this document we make casual use of the terms “CPC Classifications”, “classifications”, “classes”, “domains”, “markets”, etc. and we have shortened or modified some classification names in order to make the ideas clearer. Please ask if you would like clarification about anything.

Because we are counting the patents within each classification, patents with multiple classifications will show up within the each, so readers should not treat the counts as additive when evaluating higher level classifications; counts must be recalculated at the parent class in order to avoid double counting.

Patent Classifications