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Actions for Intellectual Property

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Actions for Intellectual Property

Promote intellectual property activities to
support innovation and contribute
to the realization of sustainable growth

Koji Taniuchi
General Manager, Legal & Intellectual
Property Division

This interview was originally published in the ROHM Group Integrated Report 2024.

ROHM’s Medium-Term Management Plan states that reaching net sales of one trillion yen and entering the top 10 manufacturers for power and analog semiconductors is our goal as a major global player, and efforts are underway to focus on “power” and “analog” areas in our intellectual property strategy as well. We must build an intellectual property portfolio that is suitable in terms of both quality and quantity to ensure our competitive advantage in the market in fields of strategic sales growth such as the power device business represented by SiC and the ASSP strategic top 10 products in the IC business. In addition, we will promote the creation of know-how that will become a strength of IDM for the purpose of further increasing productivity and reliability in production areas that underpin sales and income.
To increase our earning power, it is important that we tie patents, know-how, and other forms of intellectual property to sources of added value and competitiveness. At ROHM, we are focusing our efforts on training inventors, particularly young employees, and aim to become a major global player through the continuous creation of inventions.

Patent Strategy to Become a Major Global Player

The strength of the IDM adopted by ROHM is the fact that productivity and reliability can be improved by integrating technologies. The integrated technologies of semiconductor manufacturing consisting of “circuit design,” “layout,” and “process” are our bodies of know-how accumulated over many years and the most important form of intellectual property for ROHM to grow sustainably.
At ROHM, we have been registering know-how in an internal database since FY2016 to utilize it as shared wisdom rather than individual expertise. The number of registered know-how entries is increasing every year with less than 100 entries in FY2017 growing to over 300 in FY2022. The registered know-how is developed into standards, guidelines, and design rules and embedded into mass production workflows, equipment, and tools, which has led to increased reliability and productivity.
In terms of strategy, we are focusing on know-how related to SiC, IGBT*, GaN*, and other power devices and the ASSP strategic top 10 products in ICs to secure our competitive advantage by acquiring patent rights for technological inventions that realize high added value in these areas.

*IGBT: Stands for Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor, which is a transistor that combines a MOSFET and a bipolar transistor.It has both low on resistance and relatively rapid switching, and it is currently used in a broad range of areas for voltage control of large power
※GaN: Stands for Gallium Nitride, which is a compound semiconductor material used in next-generation power devices. This substance is superior to silicon, which is the material normally used in semiconductors, in its physical properties, and it is starting to be used for its high-frequency properties

Number of retained know-how entries

Number of retained know-how entries

Increase rate of patents held since FY2019 in ROHM priority areas

Increase rate of patents held since FY2019 in ROHM priority areas

Securing and Developing Human Resources to Promote Intellectual Property Strategy

知的財産戦略を支える人財の確保と育成

1 Change in the ratio of inventors in their first five years after joining the company calculated based on the number of inventors in 2017

2 Employees at the Head Office

At ROHM, we believe it is important to nurture young, flexible minds for the continuous creation of innovation. This is why we have been striving to foster a mindset of intellectual property creation among young engineers since FY2016. There is a system which grants a “new inventor award” to engineers who have applied for a patent or registered their know-how by the fifth year after joining the company. In the last six years, the number of young employees who filed such notifications by their fifth year after joining the company increased by roughly 2.5 times, showing that the seeds of innovation creation are clearly taking root. To create an invention, one must have considerable technical capabilities in their field. We are building a foundation for invention by creating a ranking list of patents that have contributed to ROHM sales and sharing how those patented technologies were created and the key conceptual points with other engineers. To become a major global player, it is essential that we nurture intellectual property personnel who can play an active role on a global level, and we are systematically promoting both off-the-job training and on-the-job training. In addition, we promote the upskilling of each team member through semi-annual discussions between supervisors and subordinates about their skills and career path.

Proactive Filing of Patent Applications for Sustainable Growth

Intellectual Property Governance System