The risk fact first: the power-semiconductor market that runs EVs, industrial drives, and the grid is supplied by a short list of companies, and a meaningful share of that list is Japanese and European. US10840340B2, granted November 2020 to Fuji Electric, is a silicon-carbide (SiC) device-and-circuit patent (CPC H01L 29/1608) — one marker of that concentration.
Gloss the device once: silicon carbide lets a power transistor block higher voltage and switch with lower loss than silicon, which is why it migrated into EV traction inverters and fast chargers. Fuji Electric is one of the established merchant suppliers of these parts — a name unfamiliar to AI-focused investors but central to the electrification supply chain.
Why a risk-and-supply desk reads this: customer-concentration analysis usually runs from the buyer's side, but supplier concentration is the mirror image, and it is acute in power chips. When a handful of firms hold the device-and-process IP for SiC, the automakers and industrial buyers downstream inherit a concentrated dependency that shows up as a sourcing risk.
The geography matters. Power-semiconductor leadership clusters in Japan and Europe, with established firms holding deep process know-how rather than a single dominant fab. A 2020 grant from a Japanese incumbent is a small confirmation of where that know-how sits — a strategic-dependency map drawn one patent at a time.
The standard caveat: this grant is a device-and-circuit patent and a defensive asset, not a market-share statement. It evidences Fuji Electric's continued IP activity in SiC; it does not by itself quantify the company's volume or its customers' exposure.
For the period reader, the takeaway is that supply-chain risk in chips is not only a leading-edge-logic story. The slower power market carries its own concentration, and the firms quietly holding SiC IP in 2020 were positioning for the electrification demand that followed.