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CPC technology class · G11

G11B — Information Storage Based ON Relative Movement Between Re…

Information storage based on relative movement between record carrier and transducer. 21,500 US utility patents granted 2015–2025, with the leading assignees and year-by-year filing trajectory.

21,500
US patents granted
G11
Parent CPC class
20
Active assignees
-32%
5-yr velocity
Top assignee: Seagate Technology LLC (1,922 patents)

CPC subclass G11B — INFORMATION STORAGE BASED ON RELATIVE MOVEMENT BETWEEN RECORD CARRIER AND TRANSDUCER — covers 21,500 US utility patents granted between 2015 and 2025 according to USPTO PatentsView records. This subclass sits within the broader CPC class G11 (INFORMATION STORAGE), one of roughly 250 top-level technology categories in the Cooperative Patent Classification system jointly maintained by the USPTO and the European Patent Office. At the subclass level, four-character codes like G11B give the most practical resolution for tracking a specific technology domain without losing sight of adjacent filings. Every grant here has been classified by a USPTO examiner based on the technical disclosure in the patent specification.

The competitive landscape in G11B is shaped by 20 distinct companies actively filing in this space. Seagate Technology LLC leads with 1,922 patents, followed by International Business Machines Corporation at 72,926 grants and Western Digital Technologies, Inc. at 3,986. Concentration at the top of the leaderboard indicates whether this technology area is dominated by a handful of incumbents or fragmented across many filers — a useful signal for investors evaluating competitive moats and for product teams mapping freedom-to-operate risk.

Filing trajectory matters as much as static counts. The yearly series on this page plots grants from 2015 through 2025, highlighting whether innovation in G11B is accelerating, plateauing, or cooling. Technology areas with rising post-2020 activity often reflect emerging markets or new platform shifts, while declining filings can signal mature domains where incremental improvement has slowed. Researchers, licensing professionals, and competitive-intelligence teams use these patterns — together with the top-assignee distribution — to decide where to invest, where to license, and where to avoid entanglement. All counts on this page come directly from USPTO PatentsView and reflect US granted utility patents only.

Is G11B innovation accelerating?

US utility-patent grants per year in G11B, 2015–2025 — recent five years are down 32% versus 2015–2019.

01,0002,0003,0004,000 20152016201720182019202020212022202320242025 901

Who leads G11B?

The 12 most active assignees in INFORMATION STORAGE BASED ON RELATIVE MOVEMENT BETWEEN RECORD CARRIER AND TRANSDUCER — wider bars mean more grants

patents

What this shows Seagate Technology is the most active filer in G11B, holding 1,922 of the 21,500 patents in this class. Concentration at the top signals how contestable this technology area is for new entrants.

Source USPTO PatentsView — granted utility patents As of 2015–2025 grant years
View data table
Top patent holders in CPC subclass G11B
Rank Company Patents in G11B
#1 Seagate Technology LLC 3,383
#2 International Business Machines Corporation 72,926
#3 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. 3,986
#4 Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba 12,848
#5 SONY GROUP CORPORATION 20,593
#6 Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation 1,454
#7 FUJIFILM Corporation 8,518
#8 HGST Netherlands, B.V. 453
#9 Headway Technologies, Inc. 354
#10 SONOS, INC. 1,911
#11 MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC 24,392
#12 GoPro, Inc. 1,698
#13 WESTERN DIGITAL (FREMONT), LLC 227
#14 TDK CORPORATION 2,914
#15 SNAP INC. 3,345
#16 AT&T Intellectual Property I, L.P. 9,554
#17 Oracle International Corporation 7,343
#18 Avago Technologies General IP (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. 1,321
#19 Marvell International Ltd. 1,491
#20 Rovi Guides, Inc. 2,091

About This Class

CPC subclass G11B belongs to class G11.

21,500 patents were granted in this class between 2015 and 2025.

20 companies actively patent in this space.

Classification System

Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) is a hierarchical patent classification system used by the USPTO and EPO.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is CPC class G11B?
CPC subclass G11B covers INFORMATION STORAGE BASED ON RELATIVE MOVEMENT BETWEEN RECORD CARRIER AND TRANSDUCER. It belongs to CPC class G11 (INFORMATION STORAGE). The Cooperative Patent Classification is a hierarchical system used by the USPTO and European Patent Office to categorize patents by technology.
How many patents have been filed in G11B?
21,500 US utility patents were granted in CPC subclass G11B between 2015 and 2025, based on USPTO PatentsView data.
Which company holds the most patents in G11B?
Seagate Technology LLC leads G11B with 1,922 patents, making it the most active assignee in this technology area.
How is patent data for G11B collected?
Patent data comes from USPTO PatentsView, a public research dataset maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It covers all US granted utility patents and assigns CPC codes based on the technology described in each patent.
What is the difference between CPC class and subclass?
A CPC class (e.g., G11) is a broad technology category. Subclasses like G11B provide finer granularity within that category. PlainPatent organizes data at the subclass level (4-character codes) for the most useful view of technology domains.

Learn More

How to Read Patent Data

Understand CPC codes, patent claims, and key metrics
How Innovation Score Works

The composite metric behind company scoring
Patent Moat Analysis

How patents create competitive barriers

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Seagate Technology

The leading filer in G11B — full patent portfolio
All technology classes

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Technology leaders

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How to read CPC data

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Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.

Data sourced from USPTO PatentsView — official U.S. government patent data. See our methodology for computation details. Retrieved and formatted by PlainPatent Editorial