Semiconductor and software dominate year 2008 US patent recipients

The innovation and semiconductor goes together more than any other industry. It's clearly visible from the recently announced Top U.S.-patent recipients by IFI patent intelligence. The 16 of Top 35 recipients are into semiconductor business. Pure semiconductor company; Intel is ranked in 5th position. Even the patent king IBM, which is granted with record 4146 patents is very much into semiconductor and just like Intel IBM is doing excellent research to keep the Moore's Law valid.
Samsung Electronics, second in the list, is also the second biggest semiconductor device manufacturer in the world.
Though US are companies are loosing their supremacy, but the only other holding strong position are Japanese companies; the immediate competitor for US in semiconductor domain. The only two Asian countries whose companies are listed in top 35 are, South Korea and Taiwan.
The Indian companies with a good reputation for design services have not able to make into this list. Even China is laggard in innovation with no company from China in the top 35 list. Eventually over the years, companies from India and China might take a leading position in this list.

Electronics companies (including software, telecom but excluding semiconductor) are the next highest in the list. Microsoft is ranked 4th in the list.

The movers and shakers of the list are, Broadcom and Cisco, both up by 21 percent in comparison to 2007; Hon Hai of Taiwan, up by 63 percent and new to the top 35; Fujifilm, up by 31 percent; and LG Philips LCD, up by 25 percent.

Here below is the table listing top 35 companies.

Rank	Name of the company	Total number of granted patents
1	INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORP	4186
2	SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO LTD KR	3515
3	CANON K K JP	2114
4	MICROSOFT CORP	2030
5	INTEL CORP	1776
6	MATSUSHITA ELECTRIC INDUSTRIAL CO LTD JP	1745
7	TOSHIBA CORP JP	1609
8	FUJITSU LTD JP	1494
9	SONY CORP JP	1485
10	HEWLETT-PACKARD DEVELOPMENT CO L P	1424
11	HITACHI LTD JP	1313
12	MICRON TECHNOLOGY INC	1250
13	SEIKO EPSON CORP JP	1229
14	GENERAL ELECTRIC CO	912
15	FUJIFILM CORP JP	869
16	RICOH CO LTD JP	857
17	INFINEON TECHNOLOGIES AG DE	814
18	LG ELECTRONICS INC KR	805
19	TEXAS INSTRUMENTS INC	757
20	HONDA MOTOR CO LTD JP	747
21	SIEMENS AG DE	724
22	HON HAI PRECISION INDUSTRY CO LTD TW	719
23	DENSO CORP JP	708
24	CISCO TECHNOLOGY INC	704
25	BROADCOM CORP	643
26	HONEYWELL INTERNATIONAL INC	619
27	NOKIA AB OY FI	608
28	SILVERBROOK RESEARCH PTY LTD AU	608
29	SHARP K K JP	603
30	NEC CORP JP	547
31	BROADCOM CORPXEROX CORP	529
32	LG PHILIPS LCD CO LTD KR 2	524
33	RENESAS TECHNOLOGY CORP JP	513
34	SUN MICROSYSTEMS INC	509
35	KONINKLIJKE PHILIPS ELECTRONICS N V NL	497

Source: IFI Patent Intelligence