Recently, Nvidia, the American technology company most known for its graphics processing units (GPU) announced it will acquire Softbank owned Arm, a large player in semiconductor technology. Arm’s chips power over 95% of the world’s smartphone market as its primary business is licencing its IP.

When evaluating a strategic acquisition or merger opportunity, it’s crucial to consider the intellectual property owned by this party. In this case, Nvidia and Arm’s IP portfolios are very complementary. The combination of the two companies’ IP portfolios will enable Nvidia to become a computer processor powerhouse, with technical applications in AI, autonomous driving, datacentres, IoT devices, smartphones and more.

Using PatBase Analytics V3, you can quickly and easily compare two (or more!) companies’ patent portfolios by utilising the handy in-built comparison tool. Start by running a search by assignee to generate a result set of a company’s full patent portfolio then run an analysis on each set. PatBase Analytics V3 can analyse an unlimited number of patent records. With just a few clicks, you can compare up to 4 result sets and generate automatic comparison charts.

Result sets can be compared based on various criteria, including jurisdiction coverage, classification groups, application velocity, semantic similarity and more. The graph below shows the Nvidia and Arm patent portfolios compared by the top 10 International Patent Classifications (IPC). There is a 43% similarity in classification codes between the two assignees’ portfolios. However, as we can see in the chart, where Nvidia (red) has many patents (G06T1/20, G06T15/00, G09G5/00) Arm (blue) has fewer and vice versa. This shows that with the acquisition of Arm and its IP, Nvidia benefits from a strategic levelling of its patent portfolio across its top technologies.

PatBase Analytics V3 is available now with the newly launched PatBase 2.0. PatBase 2.0 is the biggest update ever to PatBase, introducing super-fast search and analysis, publication-level searching, intuitive highlighting, new search commands and much more to improve the User experience and simplify patent searching.

Try PatBase 2.0 by registering here for a commitment-free two-week free trial: https://minesoft.com/patbase/