Integrated Silicon Photonics: Visualisation of Patent Datasets for Mapping Technology

Analysing patent information is considered to be one of the most systematic and logical methodology to get an insight into the progress of technologies. Patent statistics can be used to ascertain the maturity of specific technologies or to identify technological trends. Similarly, it is possible to identify whether research activities are clustered or scattered by comparing the number of applications with the number of applicants. Visualization technique is considered to be most eloquent and illustrative way of representing patent information and its analysis results to get insight into various aspects of any particular technology 1 . Statistical analysis of the relevant patent dataset is carried out using patent maps in the visualisation techniques. Different patent maps help in understanding various aspects about the searched system/technology like top patent assignees, top Inventors. Time based analysis provides the trends of technology on the time scale, while cross-mapping of the patent documents provides further useful information. All the above analysis can be illustrated in patent maps to make it more presentable, structured and customised. In the present paper, the patent maps have been exploited to understand technologies and other aspects related to the integrated silicon photonics. DOI: 10.14429/djlit.35.2.8425