Visualization of Patents belonging to composite materials used in electronics

There have been numerous methods which are used to identify evolution of technologies. One prestigious of those methods has been analyzing the patent information using the visualization methods. An esteemed visualization method was also presented by Kim et al. in 2008, where some drawbacks of existing methods have been handled rigorously. In their proposed visualization method, collected keywords from the patents of a target technology-field are clustered by k-means algorithm. With the clustering results, a semantic network of keywords is formed. Subsequently, a patent map is built up using the patents. Since composite materials have been key materials for microelectronic devices ranging from computers, sensors and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMs), nano-MEMS to bio-MEMS, in this study, patents which belong to the composite materials used in electronics have been analyzed. For this purpose, European Patent Office's database “esp@cenet” has been searched for the technologies covering the composite materials that can be used in electronics. 69 granted patents has been retrieved and analyzed using the Kim et al.'s (2008) visualization method. The “keyword existence matrix” defined through the proposed methodology has been formed using the keyword list of “Composites Science and Technology” which is a well-respected journal in the related domain.