South Korea's tech industry is among the best in the country for semiconductor patent statistics, with 2,594 units held by SK Hynix in 2011-2015 and Samsung Electronics occupying the top two positions with 2,566 units, a combined percentage of 8.8%, hitting the U.S. local industry. Media ET News reported that according to KIPO statistics, there were 58,838,000 patents on memory design, manufacturing and packaging applications filed in the United States from 2011 to 2015, of which 5,160 (about 8.8%) were SK Sea Lux and Samsung, followed by 2,289 Toshiba, 2,120 Micron, 1,977 IBM, 1,289 Western Digital and 1,008 Intel In 2011, the seven companies in the United States The number of memory patents applied for was 417 and then grew steadily each year to 4,151 in 2015. Solid state drives (SSDs) can gradually replace general purpose hard drives (HDDs), and the industry is greatly contributing to patent applications in the field of NAND Flash. According to the agency, South Korea's first patent applications for 3D DRAM and 3D NAND Flash, which are stacked structures, have led to changes in the global memory market, leading to 4,388 applications from South Korea in the same period, Followed by 3,739 SK hynix, Intel 759 ranked third, TSMC 572 ranked fourth, followed by Micron 357, Witten 150, Toshiba 140. South Korean Patent Office Electronic Components Review Group said that, Hardware is a core element of Industry 4.0 and the growth in memory demand made the Korean memory industry's market position even more important.
