Manual Assessment of Qualcomm’s Patent Portfolio in Relation to the Wi-Fi 6 Standard

Description

To identify Qualcomm’s patents related to Wi-Fi 6, we employed Wi-Fi 6 relevant keywords such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), Target Wake Time (TWT), Basic Service Set (BSS) Color, High-Efficiency (HE), 802.11ax, 160 MHz, beamforming, spatial streams, 78.125 kHz, 1024-QAM, spatial reuse, Resource Unit (RU) allocation, etc. The CPCs used for filtering included H04W, H04W 84/12, H04W 72/04, H04W 72/12, H04W 52/02, H04W 52/36, H04W 88/08, H04B, H04B 7/06, etc. Using this approach, we identified 300 unique Qualcomm patent families potentially related to Wi-Fi 6 by manually reviewing the bibliographic details of each patent family.

The manual evaluation ensures that only patents aligned with the Wi-Fi 6 standard are labelled essential, with each claim thoroughly reviewed without reliance on an AI algorithm. We have analysed one patent per family. If that patent is found to be essential, we did not evaluate the remaining family members. However, if it is found to be non-essential, we analysed other patents within the same family to assess their essentiality.