The BrainChip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN) share price is having a subdued day on Thursday.
At the time of writing, the semiconductor company's shares are flat at 87.5 cents.
This compares unfavourably to the performance of the ASX 200 index, which is currently up 0.5%.
And that's despite BrainChip releasing its second announcement in as many days.
Image source: Getty Images
What did BrainChip announce?
This morning BrainChip announced that it has strengthened its patent portfolio with a "new milestone."
The release notes that this new milestone demonstrates the company's intention and openness to recognise essential technologies of other parties and acquire their intellectual property (IP) to improve its long-term competitive advantage.
On this occasion, the company has now gained full ownership of the IP rights related to the JAST learning rule and algorithms that were acquired from French technology transfer-based company TTT in 2017.
This has allowed the company to terminate the licence agreement that came with the original acquisition.
Though, with a one-off fee of just 250,000 euros, it doesn't appear as though TTT placed much value on this IP. This may be why the BrainChip share price is responding in such a manner today.
Nevertheless, BrainChip stated that it "believes the pending patent applications, once issued, will protect a broad level of learning algorithms, providing competitive advantages to the Company."
It highlights that key features of the acquired IP rights are as follows:
- The underlying invention relates to unsupervised detection of repeating patterns in a series of events.
- Detection of repeating patterns is performed through an innovative bit-swap method enabling resource-efficient implementation in silicon.
Combined with yesterday's patent issue in the United States, BrainChip has a patent portfolio comprising 9 US, 1 European, and 1 Chinese issued patents. It also has 29 patent applications pending across all markets.
