everything PE recently interviewed Nicolas Baron, CEO and co-founder, and Rémi Comyn, Senior Analyst at Knowmade. Knowmade specializes in developing patent analysis, innovation strategies, and market intelligence.

Q. Can you give us a brief history of KnowMade? When was the company founded and what was the goal?

Nicolas Baron: KnowMade was founded in 2009 to introduce a unique approach that adds a new dimension to competitive and technology intelligence.

Specializing in the analysis of patents and scientific publications, KnowMade assists innovative companies, investors, and R&D organizations in understanding the competitive landscape, tracking technological developments, reducing uncertainties, and identifying opportunities and risks related to technology and intellectual property. We turn patent information and scientific literature into actionable insights, delivering high value-added reports for decision-makers working in R&D, Intellectual Property, Innovation Strategy, and Marketing.

Q. Can you tell us more about your product portfolio?

Nicolas Baron: KnowMade offers tailor-made studies to hundreds of customers worldwide, publishes off-the-shelf reports, and shares expert insights through free articles and webinars.

Our highly qualified analysts, who possess strong technological backgrounds (PhDs) and deep expertise in patent analysis, utilize cutting-edge analytics tools and methodologies to provide prior art searches, patent landscape analyses, freedom-to-operate analyses, patent valuations, IP due diligence, scientific literature reviews, and monitoring services.

Q. Which market segments do you cater to?

Nicolas Baron: KnowMade develops products and services to track and analyze innovations related to the following megatrends:

• The electrification and decarbonization of our society, including the transformations occurring in the electrical energy storage and conversion and their impact on the transportation sector.
• The digitalization of our data-centric world and humanity’s desire to connect everyone to everything, all the time, and the implications this has for hardware.
• The revolution occurring in machine perception, with smart sensors that mimic human senses or gather information in ways beyond human capability, enhancing our ability to sense and interpret the world.
• The impact of high-performance computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications on innovations in semiconductor advanced packaging, interconnects, and memory technologies.
• The latest advances in modern biotechnology, from pharmaceutical development to food production and the treatment of polluting waste.
• The evolving of the medical and agri-food sectors, which put the human back on top of their product development matters to monitor and improve their health and nutrition.
  

Q. What are the key challenges faced by the power electronics industry in the large-scale adoption of GaN and SiC power electronics devices? 

Rémi Comyn: Over the last decade, key challenges have been addressed by the power electronics industry to prepare for the large-scale adoption of SiC and GaN technologies, especially: 

• Building a complete and resilient supply chain and infrastructure
• Improving performance and reliability in critical applications
• Increasing cost competitiveness with Si power devices

As a result, certain companies have invested massively in the deployment of SiC and GaN technologies and thus expect to benefit significantly from the fast-growing demand. Yet the market competition has also grown rapidly, especially in China, where relatively new players demonstrated significant progress in developing the technology. Relying on the substantial support provided by Chinese authorities, some of these companies are already challenging the leadership of well-established players in SiC and GaN markets. Dealing with the future developments of US-China trade war and their consequences for the access to the Chinese market and for the impact of Chinese players on the global competition, may become one of the key challenges for SiC and GaN companies in the coming years.

Q. How does KnowMade's patent analysis help power electronics companies navigate the evolving landscape of wide-bandgap technologies like SiC and GaN? 

Rémi Comyn: KnowMade leverages patent analysis to describe the ecosystems emerging for GaN and SiC technologies, highlighting the patenting activities of companies across the whole supply chain. 

Examples of typical questions KnowMade aims to answer in its IP reports include:

• Who are the players actively engaged in the development of SiC and GaN technologies? Where are they positioned in the supply chain? What is the status of their technological development?
• Which applications are targeted? Which markets are players interested in? What is the technological roadmap? What are the strengths and weaknesses from an IP perspective?
• Among thousands of patents, which are the vital ones to my competitors?
• Which patents should I know about when conducting R&D activities or before releasing new products onto the market?

This competitive patent analysis provides a fair comparison of players’ IP position at different levels of the supply chain, for different technologies (e.g., trench SiC MOSFET vs. planar MOSFET). Such approach is a perfect complement to a traditional market analysis, since many companies enter first the patent landscape, before entering the market. Especially, Chinese patenting activity has been huge lately and provides a unique insight into the development of a domestic supply chain for SiC and GaN technologies in China.  

Since KnowMade’s patent analyses are built to facilitate the comparison between patent and market activities of companies across the supply chain, our customers can identify early new risks and new opportunities for their business. What’s more, KnowMade offers monitoring services reporting on the IP activities quarter by quarter, to keep up with the fast evolution of the SiC and GaN patent landscapes.

Q. How will KnowMade address emerging trends in the semiconductor industry in 2025?

Nicolas Baron: In 2025, KnowMade will continue to monitor and analyze innovations and IP activities in the semiconductor industry, as well as related microelectronics, photonics, and advanced packaging fields. Our products and services have been designed to help semiconductor stakeholders identify, analyze, and track R&D roadmaps and IP strategies of key players and new entrants across the whole value chain, providing competitive intelligence, highlighting weak signals, and detecting potential IP/technology risks or opportunities.

This year, we will particularly focus on patents and technological developments in the automotive semiconductor segment, driven by the rising need for electrification and autonomous driving, the computation and data storage markets, driven by the requirements for servers to accommodate cloud computing and AI, as well as the wireless communications sector, with new technological prospects for 5G/6G and IoT. Specific areas of interest will include GaN and SiC power electronics, advanced semiconductor packaging (fan-out, hybrid bonding, interconnect bridges, chiplets, co-packaged optics), high-bandwidth memories (HBM) and emerging memories (ReRAM, MRAM, PCM), RF front-end modules and components (SAW, BAW, XBAR, PA/LNA), photonic ICs, LiDAR, and imaging RADAR, among others. Furthermore, with the dawn of the Asian century, we will place particular emphasis on understanding the implications of China’s IP growth for the semiconductor business.

About Nicolas Baron and Rémi Comyn

Nicolas Baron, PhD. Nicolas is the CEO and co-founder of KnowMade. He manages the development and strategic orientation of the company and personally leads the semiconductor department. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, and a Master of Intellectual Property Strategies and Innovation from the European Institute for Enterprise and Intellectual Property (IEEPI), Strasbourg, France.

Rémi Comyn works for KnowMade as a Senior Analyst in the field of Compound Semiconductors and Electronics. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (France) in partnership with CRHEA-CNRS (Sophia Antipolis, France) and the University of Sherbrooke (Québec, Canada). Rémi previously worked in a compound semiconductors research laboratory as Research Engineer.