INESC TEC has its first patent granted in China

INESC TEC has a patent granted in China for the first time. The accomplishment was achieved with the C4Mir technology (“Control Module for Multiple Mixed-Signal Resources Management”), which had already seen its patent applications be granted in Europe, USA, South Korea and Japan.

C4MiR contributes with a systematic and flexible method in order to test mixed-signal integrated circuits during their lifetime, helping in standardizing the way these tests are done, which can be included in the microcircuits’ design. These capabilities could even benefit chip and electronic circuit designs in other ways beyond the test possibilities, namely through new synchronization capabilities and greater efficiency that this technology brings to this type of buses, assuming a very wide application potential in the ICT area, particularly when applied to industry and the Internet of things.

Besides the direct involvement in these areas, C4Mir has an indirect impact on other sectors such as agri-food, automobile, marine economics, material and raw material, health, medical devices, manufacturing technologies, robotics, contributing to the technological potential of the Portuguese industry.

José Machado da Silva (CTM – INESC TEC’s Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia), Miguel Velhote (CBER – INESC TEC’S Centre for Biomedical Engineering Research) and António Salazar (at the time, a researcher of CTM and who is currently working at Synopsis) were the inventors of C4MiR.

It should be noted that, although there is a broad global consensus in terms of patent legislation, each country is sovereign and is free to introduce some specificities. The history and practice of the several patent offices is different, which has an impact on the assessment of the arguments presented to justify the novelty and inventiveness of the invention to be protected by patent. Furthermore, and considering that in the patent system the “weight” of each word is very well measured, the barriers to mandatorily communicate in Chinese and its impact on the interpretation of the message introduce some difficulty to the process.

The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with UP-FEUP