IBM Leads in U.S. Patents for Fifth Consecutive Year Capping 1997’s Technology Breakthroughs
ARMONK, N.Y (January 12, 1998) – For the fifth consecutive year, IBM has been granted the most U.S. patents. IBM received 1,724 U.S. patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office — over 300 more than any other company, according to IFI/Plenum Data Corporation, which produces the CLAIMS(TM) patent database.
The announcement caps a year in which IBM recorded a number of major technology achievements. In 1997, IBM introduced a breakthrough in semiconductor technology with the development of smaller, faster, more powerful and less costly integrated circuits using copper “wiring” in place of aluminum — a groundbreaking technological advance that had eluded chip manufacturers for decades.
IBM set a record for disk drive storage capacity, breaking the barrier of 10 billion bits of data per square inch; and introduced the world’s highest capacity new hard disk drives for both notebook and desktop personal computers. Also in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated Garry Kasparov in a chess match that captured worldwide attention.
The company also continued to introduce advances in speech recognition, including new Via Voice products for the Chinese
and Japanese markets.
IBM has more than 50 issued and pending patents relating to the use of copper interconnect technology. The company’s 1997 U.S. patent portfolio includes more than 550 software-related patents and over 250 related to network computing, reflecting IBM’s research and development emphasis in this area. Many of these patents in IBM’s portfolio also serve multiple business applications, such as advancing its strategic focus on global e-business.
IBM maintains one of the broadest ranges of patented technologies in the information technology industry — covering all aspects of networking, computer systems, architecture and large servers; semiconductors; disk drive technology; and software applications. The number of U.S. patents awarded to IBM in the four previous years were:
1996: 1,867
1995: 1,383
1994: 1,298
1993: 1,085
Trailing IBM in the top ten for 1997 were Canon with 1,378; NEC with 1,095; Motorola with 1,058; Fujitsu with 903; Hitachi with 902; Mitsubishi with 893; Toshiba with 862; Sony with 860 and Eastman Kodak with 795. “IBM’s leadership in patent innovation is a direct response to the challenge of the marketplace — to develop new technologies for e-business and user-oriented products for a networked world,” said Marshall Phelps, Jr., vice president of intellectual property and licensing for IBM. “IBM inventors’ creativity in e-business is represented by this accomplishment.” Among the U.S. patents issued to IBM inventions in 1997 are:
U.S. Patent 5,625,609 describes a method for reading data from two or more distinct layers of an optical disk from the same side without turning the disk over. This technology enables extremely long movies to be viewed without interruption on a dual-layer Digital Video Disk. For DVD-ROM applications, the amount of data directly accessible to the user can be virtually doubled.
U.S. Patent 5,682,273 describes IBM’s Adaptive Battery Life xtender(TM) method for reducing the power consumed by disk drives in mobile computers. Used in all IBM mobile 2.5″ disk drives, it can reduce consumption by up to 40% compared to conventional power saving schemes. This translates into a battery life increase of 5 – 15%. Power reduction is achieved by managing transitions between active and low-power modes, based on individual usage patterns.
U.S. Patent 5,649,070, sometimes referred to as “veggie vision,” is an IBM invention supermarket checkout clerks will love. It is able to categorize objects of the same type but which may have a variety of appearances. Fruits and vegetables, for example, may vary in color depending on their degree of ripeness. A checkout person may not recognize all the produce items in the store, but “veggie vision” will.
U.S. Patent 5,625,877, temporarily assigns additional radio channels to mobile devices such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), a cellular phone, a computer or a fax machine, to increase bandwidth during periods of heavy dataflow. The mobile device is assigned a single bandwidth with a given radio channel, however during periods of heavy use additional channels are temporarily assigned to increase the speed of wireless transmission.
U.S. Patent 5,675,329 doubles the usefulness of each computer keyboard key depending on how hard the key is struck. Force sensors are attached to the keys to detect how hard the keys are depressed. The sensor can differentiate between a normal level of force and a greater force, performing two different functions with each different depression
Source: IBM