Developments in electronics are often driven by specific use cases and application scenarios. Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) efficiently handle computational tasks using tailored analog and digital processing. Novel measurement and sensor techniques are widely employed in a connected world. The Internet of Things inter-connects such local systems to complement local sensing and local computing with central, cloud-based services.

When drafting and prosecuting patent applications in EE, care is required to adequately balance hardware-specific features and application-specific functional features. Only the right trade-off ensures the broadest possible scope of protection. This often requires capturing inter-relationships between technical features across various integration levels: from the design and fabrication of individual logic elements on transistor level, the computational blocks and processor architecture for arithmetic operations and memory read/write operations, towards data processing on application level, there can be know-how worthwhile being protected.