Searching of European Nanotechnology Patents

EPO (European Patent Office) has taken actions to get to grips with this new technology, the one that has been welcomed most by nanotechnologists, was the introduction of the “Y01N” tags to label nanotechnology in EPO databases with, highly efficient tagging system.

The Y01N code is not static, but is constantly updated and improved as new aspects of this young technology emerge. Y01N is divided into six main groups (from Y01N2 to Y01N12), with each group collecting nanotechnology patents of similar technological backgrounds. The six subgroups are:

Code	Nanotechnology field
Y01N2	Nanobiotechnology
Y01N4	Nanotechnology for information processing, storage and transmission
Y01N6	Nanotechnology for materials and surface science
Y01N8	Nanotechnology for interacting, sensing or actuating
Y01N10	Nano optics
Y01N12	Nanomagnetics

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