Infringement Analysis in Leuven.

A patent infringement analysis Leuven companies can rely on has to be built for two forums that both sit in Brussels, not Leuven — the Brussels Enterprise Court, which holds exclusive national jurisdiction over every Belgian patent case, and the Brussels local division of the Unified Patent Court for European and unitary patents. Leuven is one of Europe’s densest deep-tech patenting clusters, home to imec and KU Leuven, and the rights asserted here read on semiconductors, nanoelectronics, chip-design methods and biotech. Proving that an accused product or process falls within claims that technical demands teardowns, process reconstruction and element-by-element mapping, not a datasheet comparison. PerspireIP builds the claim charts and evidence-of-use that make — or break — that link.

Where a patent infringement analysis Leuven case is decided

Although the invention was born in Leuven, a Belgian patent dispute is not litigated there. Since 1 January 2015, Article XI.337 of the Belgian Code of Economic Law confers on the Brussels Enterprise Court (Ondernemingsrechtbank Brussel / Tribunal de l’entreprise de Bruxelles) exclusive national jurisdiction over patent matters. Every patent infringement and validity action in Belgium — wherever the parties are based, and whether the technology comes out of a Leuven chip lab or a Ghent biotech — funnels to this single bench. There is no regional patent court in Flemish Brabant; Leuven’s disputes are heard 25 kilometres away in Brussels.

That concentration is deliberate. Belgium wanted its technically demanding patent cases resolved by judges who see them constantly, so it stripped patent competence from the other enterprise courts and gave it to Brussels alone. The court rules on both infringement and validity in the same proceedings — in practice the accused party almost always files a counterclaim for nullity — and the seat is composed of legal judges without a jury. On appeal the case rises to the Brussels Court of Appeal (Hof van Beroep Brussel), which holds the matching exclusive appellate competence.

• Brussels Enterprise Court — exclusive national jurisdiction over all Belgian patent infringement and validity cases since 1 January 2015 (Art. XI.337 Code of Economic Law)
• Brussels Court of Appeal — the exclusively competent appellate bench for Belgian patent appeals
• Belgian Office for Intellectual Property (OPRI / DIE) — the FPS Economy office that grants and administers the national patents being enforced
• Brussels local division of the Unified Patent Court — the parallel forum for European and unitary patents that have not been opted out

Because a single bench hears every technical patent matter in the country, the evidence that an accused product reads on the asserted claim has to be litigation-ready for this specific court from day one. Since 1 April 2024, patent attorneys may also intervene alongside lawyers to explain technical and patent-law questions — which raises the bar for the analysis put in front of the court.

Two forums in Brussels: the Enterprise Court and the UPC local division

What sets a Leuven matter apart from a purely national dispute is that Belgium runs two patent forums in parallel, and both sit in Brussels. Belgium was a founding participant in the Unitary Patent package and ratified the Unified Patent Court Agreement, so the system took effect for Belgium when the UPC opened on 1 June 2023. Alongside the national Brussels Enterprise Court, Belgium hosts a Brussels local division of the UPC, seated in the building of the FPS Economy at Rue du Progrès 50 in Brussels, with Belgian judge Samuel Granata presiding since June 2023.

Which forum governs depends on the right asserted. A Belgian national patent, and a classical European patent that has been opted out of the UPC, is enforced before the Brussels Enterprise Court under Belgian law. A unitary patent, or a European patent that has not been opted out, can be litigated before the Brussels local division of the UPC, whose injunctions and revocation reach across all contracting states in a single action. For a Leuven patent owner running the same family across Europe, that is a genuine strategic fork: national precision on one track, pan-European reach on the other.

The opt-out decision drives everything. During the transitional period, holders of classical European patents may opt them out of the UPC’s jurisdiction, keeping enforcement on the national Brussels track; if they do not, the patent is exposed to central UPC revocation but also gains pan-European injunctive reach. Many Leuven-connected owners hold mixed portfolios — national Belgian filings, opted-out European patents and unitary patents side by side — so the same product can raise different forum questions depending on which right is asserted. Mapping the accused technology against the claim is only half the job; the other half is knowing which Brussels court will read the chart.

Before the Brussels UPC local division the languages of proceedings are Dutch, French, German and English — a practical advantage for the trilingual Belgian market and for international parties who prefer to litigate in English. For an infringement analysis, the forum choice changes the deliverable: a UPC claim chart is built for a court applying the UPC Agreement and its Rules of Procedure on an accelerated timetable, while a national chart is built for the Brussels Enterprise Court under the Code of Economic Law. PerspireIP scopes each analysis to the track it will actually be used on.

Saisie-contrefaçon: Belgium’s descriptive-seizure evidence tool

Belgium’s standout enforcement weapon is the saisie-contrefaçon — in Dutch the beslag inzake namaak, or descriptive seizure. Governed by Article 1369bis of the Belgian Judicial Code, it lets the holder of almost any intellectual-property right who suspects infringement obtain, on an ex parte application, a court order to send a court-appointed expert onto the alleged infringer’s premises — unannounced — to inspect, describe and document the allegedly infringing product or process and the scope of the infringement. Belgium first introduced this measure for patents in 1854, and it remains one of Europe’s most powerful pre-suit evidence-gathering tools.

Practitioners call it the “queen of evidence” for three reasons: the element of surprise, because it is granted without the defendant being heard; its broad reach into machines, documents, source materials and manufacturing steps that would otherwise sit behind closed factory doors; and how difficult it is to challenge after the fact. In its descriptive form it does not stop production — it captures a dated, expert-authored record of what the accused technology actually is and how it works, which is exactly the raw material an infringement analysis needs.

The tool is only as strong as the claim mapping behind the request. A judge asked to authorise an expert to enter a competitor’s premises needs a clear, element-by-element showing of why the accused product plausibly reads on the asserted claim, and the appointed expert needs a technical brief describing what to look for. That mapping has to exist before the seizure is requested. It is also why the descriptive seizure and the UPC’s own order to preserve evidence are so closely related — the UPC measure draws directly on this Belgian saisie tradition — and why PerspireIP builds the underlying claim chart first.

For the Leuven cluster the descriptive seizure is especially valuable, because so much of the infringement lies in a manufacturing process or an internal chip structure that a rights holder can never observe from the outside. A well-scoped saisie can put an independent expert in front of the production line, the process recipes or the fabrication tooling, producing a record no amount of market analysis could reconstruct. That record then feeds straight into the claim chart. Getting the technical brief right — specifying precisely which structures, steps and documents the expert should describe — is where a rigorous prior infringement analysis pays for itself, and where an over-broad or vague request can see the seizure narrowed or set aside.

Leuven’s deep-tech cluster: imec, KU Leuven and what the patents claim

Leuven’s litigation profile is written by its extraordinary concentration of deep-tech R&D. The city is home to imec, the world-leading nanoelectronics and digital-technology research institute founded there in 1984, with more than 5,500 researchers working on advanced semiconductor process nodes, silicon photonics, chip design, sensing and beyond-5G technologies. Sitting beside it is KU Leuven, one of Europe’s most research-intensive universities, whose R&D arm and spin-outs file heavily across electronics and life sciences. The two co-invent constantly, producing one of the densest deep-tech patent portfolios per capita anywhere in Europe.

The rights that emerge from this cluster are unusually technical. They read on semiconductor devices and structures — transistor architectures, nanowire and tunnel-FET geometries, memory cells — on fabrication processes, on chip-design and EDA methods, on silicon photonics and sensors, and on biotech and medtech inventions such as neural probes and diagnostic platforms. When these patents are asserted, the infringement question is rarely visible on a spec sheet: it lives inside a device that has to be physically taken apart, or inside a manufacturing recipe that has to be reconstructed.

That is why a patent infringement analysis Leuven rights holders and accused parties can rely on has to be built at teardown and process level. A claim to a transistor structure may only be proven by cross-sectioning a chip and imaging its layers; a process claim may only be proven by reconstructing deposition, etch or lithography steps from the product itself and from public technical literature. Comparing marketing materials is not enough — and for this cluster, it is often the whole battleground.

Why semiconductor and nanoelectronics claims demand teardown-level analysis

Semiconductor and nanoelectronics patents are among the hardest infringement cases to prove, and Leuven produces them in volume. A device claim typically recites structural features — layer stacks, doping profiles, gate geometries, interconnect schemes — that are buried inside a packaged chip and invisible without destructive analysis. Establishing that an accused product practises the claim means physical reverse engineering: decapsulation, cross-sectioning, scanning-electron and transmission-electron microscopy, and materials analysis to map each claimed element onto the real silicon.

Process and method claims are harder still, because the accused activity is a manufacturing sequence the patentee never sees directly. Here the analysis reconstructs the process from the finished device, from equipment and materials signatures, and from the defendant’s own public disclosures and technical papers, then charts each step against the claim — frequently under the doctrine of equivalents where a competitor has engineered around the literal wording. Biotech and medtech claims from the KU Leuven side bring their own evidentiary demands, from assay data to device characterisation.

• Device claims — decap, cross-section and electron-microscopy teardown to map claimed structures onto the accused chip
• Process claims — reconstruction of fabrication steps from the product, equipment signatures and public technical literature
• Chip-design and software claims — analysis of documented behaviour, tooling and reverse-engineered functionality
• Biotech and medtech claims — assay, formulation and device data tied to a specific marketed product

Every one of these evidence types has to be dated, sourced and documented so it survives scrutiny before the Brussels Enterprise Court or the Brussels UPC local division — and, where appropriate, supports a saisie-contrefaçon request. Thin, assertion-level analysis does not survive in this cluster.

How PerspireIP builds a Leuven infringement-analysis file

Every engagement follows the same disciplined path. We fix the claim scope first — the correct construction from the claims, specification and prosecution history — then map each element against the real accused product or process. For semiconductors we work from teardowns, cross-sections and electron microscopy; for fabrication from reconstructed process steps and equipment signatures; for chip design and software from documented behaviour and reverse-engineered functionality; for biotech from assay, formulation and device data. We chart infringement literally and, where a competitor has designed around the wording, under the doctrine of equivalents.

• Claim construction and element-by-element charting to Belgian Code of Economic Law, EPC and UPC standards
• Evidence-of-use assembly — teardowns, process reconstruction, microscopy, technical literature and public sources — dated and documented
• Infringement and non-infringement positions built for either side of a Brussels Enterprise Court or Brussels UPC dispute
• Deliverables scoped to the forum: a national complaint, a UPC action, or the technical brief and claim mapping that support a saisie-contrefaçon descriptive seizure
• Coordination with your Belgian and European counsel on national and UPC timetables, kept fully confidential

We work as a specialist analysis partner alongside your litigators, deliver to Brussels Enterprise Court and UPC deadlines, and scale to fit — a single claim chart, a multi-patent semiconductor matter or ongoing portfolio support. Whether you are a Leuven deep-tech company or imec- or KU Leuven-linked spin-out enforcing a patent, an accused party clearing a path to market, or litigation counsel preparing a complaint, a defence or a seizure application, send us the patent number and the accused product and we will scope a patent infringement analysis Leuven project within one business day.

IP Landscape & Resources in Leuven

Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Leuven:

• Belgian Office for Intellectual Property (OPRI / DIE) — the FPS Economy office that grants and administers Belgian national patents and coordinates with the EPO on the rights enforced before the Brussels courts
• Unified Patent Court — Brussels local division — the Belgian local division of the UPC, seated at the FPS Economy in Brussels, hearing European and unitary patents that have not been opted out, in Dutch, French, German or English
• European Patent Office (EPO) — grants the European and unitary patents asserted in Belgium, including the deep-tech portfolios coming out of the Leuven cluster

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