Industrial property at Soitec: A global patent portfolio
Soitec has a rigorous and proactive industrial property policy designed to support – and protect – our innovations worldwide. Each year, we file more than 350 patent applications and regularly rank among France’s top 30 patent filers alongside some major corporations. Our exclusive Smart Cut™ technology is covered by several hundred patents protecting each change made to the technology as we expand its use to new products, improve certain steps of the process, or make adjustments that reduce costs.
Today, our intellectual property portfolio contains nearly 3,000 patents with an average age of less than five years.
Soitec has nearly 3,000 active patents and files 350 additional patent applications each year.
In addition to patents for which we hold sole ownership, we also license technologies from our research and development partners. These additional patents ensure that key Soitec technologies – Smart Cut™, Smart Stacking™, and Concentrix™ – are fully protected.
The purpose of our industrial property policy is to ensure that the key Soitec technologies that we make available to license holders engaged in technology-transfer activities remain unique on the market.
One example of how effective our IP policy is came about in 1997 when we contracted with SEH of Japan for SOI manufacturing using our Smart Cut technology. The manufacturing agreement helped establish SOI products made with Smart Cut technology as the global standard. We use the same business model for our Smart Cut technology-based 3D integration process, which we develop for and then transfer to partners without necessarily keeping any actual production activities in house at Soitec.