Developments in electronics are often driven by specific use cases and application scenarios. Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) efficiently handle computational tasks using tailored analog and digital processing. Novel measurement and sensor techniques are widely employed in a connected world. The Internet of Things inter-connects such local systems to complement local sensing and local computing with central, cloud-based services.

When drafting and prosecuting patent applications in EE, care is required to adequately balance hardware-specific features and application-specific functional features. Only the right trade-off ensures the broadest possible scope of protection. This often requires capturing inter-relationships between technical features across various integration levels: from the design and fabrication of individual logic elements on transistor level, the computational blocks and processor architecture for arithmetic operations and memory read/write operations, towards data processing on application level, there can be know-how worthwhile being protected.

Likewise, for sensors and actuators, the inter-play of the basic sensor element detecting a physical observable, analog-digital or digital-analog conversion, low-level closed-loop control, and finally high-level data analysis and post-processing may give substance to an invention.

Our attorneys have profound academic backgrounds and many years of experience in drafting and prosecuting such complex applications in electronics and electrical engineering. Examples of our fields of expertise include: device integration; analog-to-digital conversion (ADC); digital-to-analog (DAC) conversion; closed-loop control; sensors including magnetic field sensing, optical sensing, and capacitive sensing; radio-frequency (RF) electronics up to the high GHz range; microelectromechanical systems (MEMS); various fabrication processes including crystal growth, lithography, etching, material deposition, etc.; and power electronics.