Patent Drawing in Grenoble.

Grenoble files more semiconductor and nanotechnology patents than any comparable city in France, and not one of them is litigated there. The Institut national de la propriete industrielle (INPI) examines from Courbevoie, outside Paris. Every French patent dispute, wherever the invention was made, is heard by the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris – which also hosts a local division and the seat of the central division of the Unified Patent Court. So a patent drawing Grenoble engineers commission is drawn for an examiner 570 kilometres north, for a judge in the same city as that examiner, and for two rulebooks that now disagree about colour.

Where a patent drawing Grenoble applicant actually files

INPI is headquartered at Courbevoie in the Paris region and takes French national filings electronically, so a Grenoble applicant files to the same queue as a Paris one. What changed in the last few years is what happens to the application after that, and it changed in a direction that puts more weight on the drawings.

Until the Loi PACTE reforms, INPI could refuse a French application only for manifest lack of novelty. It now runs a full substantive examination. Inventive step has been a patentability requirement examined by INPI for applications filed on or after 22 May 2020, which puts the French national route much closer to EPO-style prosecution than it used to be. A pre-grant opposition procedure also exists, available against French patents granted from 1 April 2020.

Two other PACTE-era instruments are used heavily by Grenoble’s deep-tech companies and both reward drawings that were done properly the first time:

• The demande provisoire de brevet — a provisional French application, available since 1 July 2020 under Decret n° 2020-15 of 8 January 2020. It buys a filing date cheaply, and the applicant then has twelve months to regularise it into a patent application or transform it into a utility certificate. Miss the twelve months and the application is deemed withdrawn.
• The certificat d’utilite — the French utility certificate, whose term PACTE raised to a maximum of ten years, and which can now be converted into a patent application rather than being a dead end.

A provisional filing is exactly where figure quality gets sacrificed to speed, and exactly where that decision costs the most. The provisional establishes the disclosure the later application has to fit inside. A sketch that omits a layer, a contact or an interface cannot be repaired twelve months later without a new priority date.

Alongside the national route, France is an EPC contracting state and a Unified Patent Court participant, and French is an official EPO language — so a Grenoble applicant reaches Europe through the EPO without the translation burden that non-official-language states carry. Most of the filing programmes we support here run a French national or provisional application for date and cost, a European application for reach, and a PCT application to hold the rest of the world open.

INPI Decision 2018-156: the French sheet-level standard

French formal requirements for patent application documents sit in a decision of the Director General of INPI — Decision n° 2018-156 of 8 November 2018, as modified — rather than in the Intellectual Property Code itself. Its drawing provisions are shorter than 37 CFR 1.84 and differ from it in ways that catch CAD-native teams.

• What counts as a drawing — all technical drawings: perspective views, exploded views, cuts and sections, details at a changed scale, process-step schematics and diagrams, and photographs, provided they are in black and white, are reproducible, and meet the requirements applicable to drawings
• Line work — executed in black lines and strokes, sufficiently dense and dark, uniformly thick and well defined, so as to permit reproduction; lines are in principle drawn with technical drawing instruments
• Shading is allowed — shadows may be placed on the figures provided they aid comprehension and do not overload the figure to the point of harming its legibility
• Lettering — figures, letters and reference signs must be simple and clear, with a minimum size of 11 points
• Layout — the different figures are arranged vertically on one or more sheets and numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals; where a sheet carries several figures they must be clearly separated from one another
• Reference signs — usable on the drawings only if they appear in the description and in the claims, and vice versa; the signs for the same elements must be identical throughout the application
• Text — the drawings contain no text at all, except short indispensable indications

The 11-point minimum is the one to internalise, because it is stated as a typographic size rather than as the physical height US and European practice uses, and default CAD annotation is routinely below it once a dense figure is scaled to fit a sheet. For applications filed before the decision took effect, it also sets the sheet geometry that remains the safe design target: A4 portrait, 21 x 29.7 cm, on a white ground, with minimum drawing margins of 2.5 cm top, 2.5 cm left, 1.5 cm right and 1 cm bottom, and drawing sheets numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals independently of the other documents, the numbers placed at the top centre of the sheet.

Those margin figures are the same ones the PCT and the EPO work to, which is the practical argument for drawing once to the strictest applicable standard rather than redrawing at each stage. The French rule that has no direct equivalent elsewhere is the reference-sign reciprocity requirement: a numeral on the sheet must appear in both the description and the claims. Reference numerals that live only in the description satisfy US practice and fail this one. Our note on patent drawing reference numerals sets out the audit we run before delivery.

Black ink at INPI, colour at the EPO, monochrome at the IB

A Grenoble applicant filing FR, EP and PCT on the same invention now faces three different answers to the same question, and the divergence is recent.

INPI Decision 2018-156 requires French drawings to be executed in black lines and strokes. Photographs are admissible as drawings, but only in black and white. That has not changed.

The EPO moved. Colour and greyscale drawings have been accepted since 1 October 2025, under a Decision of the President published at OJ EPO 2025, A49 with an accompanying Notice at OJ EPO 2025, A57. Drawings may be executed in colour or greyscale provided they are sufficiently rich in contrast and clearly displayable at 300 dpi, and the concession applies only to applications filed using the EPO’s electronic filing tools — paper filings stay black and white. Our note on the EPO colour drawing reform covers the European side in full.

The PCT international phase is a third position. Colour is not admissible internationally; the International Bureau renders colour drawings in black and white for international publication, with the original available on PATENTSCOPE.

The answer is not three drawing sets. It is figures in which colour is decorative rather than load-bearing — hatching, line weights, line styles, distinct geometry and labelled lead lines carrying the meaning — so one artwork reads correctly in colour at the EPO and in monochrome at INPI and the International Bureau.

This lands hard on Grenoble specifically. A semiconductor process-flow figure that distinguishes oxide, nitride, polysilicon and metal by fill colour collapses into indistinguishable grey bands on conversion. So does a microLED stack, a battery electrode cross-section and a false-colour micrograph from a synchrotron beamline. Every one of those is standard output here, and every one of them needs distinct hatch patterns rather than a colour key.

Where a Grenoble patent dispute is heard: Paris, and only Paris

France does not spread patent jurisdiction across its regions. For actions brought since 2 November 2009, the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris has exclusive national jurisdiction over patent disputes, and there is no choice of venue. A Grenoble company suing a Grenoble competitor over a French patent litigates in Paris.

Within that court, patent work is concentrated in the third division (troisieme chambre), which handles intellectual property exclusively. Appeals go to the Cour d’appel de Paris and from there to the Cour de cassation.

The structural point that matters for drawings is what that court does with validity. Unlike the German system, France does not bifurcate: the Paris court hears infringement and validity together, so the same judges who construe your figures against an accused product are simultaneously testing whether those figures support the claims. A figure set that stretches to cover a competitor is a figure set arguing for its own invalidity, in front of one bench, in one hearing.

The Unified Patent Court is the parallel route, and here Paris holds two roles: a local division and the seat of the central division, which hears revocation actions. A Grenoble business enforcing a European patent with unitary effect, or a classical European patent that was not opted out, is before the UPC rather than the Tribunal judiciaire — and the central division in Paris is where the validity of that patent gets attacked directly.

Whichever forum applies, the French, European and PCT documents land in front of the same judge. Reference numerals that drift between family members invite the argument that the documents describe different inventions — which is the same discipline behind our patent invalidation work in Grenoble and our prior art searching for Grenoble litigation.

What Grenoble actually files, and what those figures demand

Grenoble’s filing profile is narrower than a capital’s and far deeper. It is built around one research institute, one wafer fab and a cluster of companies that grew out of both.

• Microelectronics research — the CEA’s Grenoble centre and its institutes, CEA-Leti for micro and nanoelectronics and CEA-Liten for new energy technologies, on the Minatec and GIANT campuses. In INPI’s 2024 ranking the CEA filed 598 patent applications, fourth among all applicants in France. The figures are process-flow cross-sections, layer stacks, MEMS release sequences and photonic waveguide sections.
• Semiconductor manufacturing — STMicroelectronics’ 300 mm site at Crolles, up the Gresivaudan valley from the city, which filed 229 French applications in 2024, twelfth nationally. Device sections, gate and interconnect detail, and test structures, all of which depend on hatching to distinguish materials.
• Engineered substrates and emissive displays — Soitec at Bernin, 76 filings in 2024 and the leading mid-sized applicant in France, and Aledia, one of the top applicants in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region, working on gallium-nitride-on-silicon microLED. Wafer-bonding and layer-transfer sequences, and nanowire stacks where the feature of interest is smaller than the line weight used to draw it.
• Infrared, energy and industrial engineering — Lynred’s infrared detector work near the city, Verkor’s battery cell development, and Schneider Electric’s Grenoble campus in power management and electrical distribution. Detector array architectures, electrode and cell cross-sections, and control schematics.
• Large-scale instrumentation and life science — the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, the Institut Laue-Langevin and the EMBL outstation on the city’s science campus, plus Universite Grenoble Alpes and Grenoble INP. Beamline optics layouts, sample-handling mechanisms and instrumentation assemblies.

Two categories cause most of the formalities work we do here. Semiconductor process-flow figures fail on scale and on colour at the same time: the layers of interest are thinner than a compliant line, so a detail view at a changed scale is essential, and the fills that distinguish them have to be hatch patterns rather than colours. And instrumentation assemblies fail on the text rule — engineering drawings arrive covered in part names and dimensions, and INPI permits no text on the sheets beyond short indispensable indications, which means every label has to become a numbered reference sign that also appears in the description and the claims.

How PerspireIP prepares a patent drawing Grenoble filers can rely on

We work from whatever exists — CAD geometry, a process traveller, a TEM or SEM micrograph stack, a supplier assembly drawing, a whiteboard photograph — and produce a formal sheet set built to the standard that will actually be applied to it.

• Drawn to the strictest applicable rulebook so one set serves INPI, the EPO and the PCT without redrawing at each stage
• Colour-independent figure design — hatching, line weights and geometry carry the meaning, so the artwork survives INPI’s black-ink requirement and the International Bureau’s monochrome conversion while still filing in colour at the EPO
• Decision 2018-156 compliance checks — black line work of uniform thickness, lettering and reference signs at or above 11 points, figures arranged vertically and clearly separated, no text beyond short indispensable indications, A4 portrait with 2.5 / 2.5 / 1.5 / 1 cm margins
• Reference-sign reciprocity audit — every numeral on the sheets checked against both the description and the claims, and against every other family member, because the French rule requires the signs to appear in both and to be identical throughout
• Detail views at changed scale for thin-film and nanostructure work, so the feature that distinguishes the invention is legible after reduction
• Provisional-application sets prepared so that a demande provisoire can be regularised within its twelve months without a disclosure gap
• Family consistency so the French sheets match the European, PCT and US counterparts numeral for numeral

Turnaround on a standard utility set is measured in days, not weeks, and we quote on figure count and complexity rather than an hourly estimate. If a set has to be ready for a twelve-month Paris Convention deadline, a thirty-month national phase date or the twelve-month regularisation date on a French provisional, tell us the date and we work back from it. We do the same work in Paris, and across the rest of our French practice.

IP Landscape & Resources in Grenoble

Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Grenoble:

• Institut national de la propriete industrielle (INPI) — the French office that receives and examines national patent applications, utility certificates and provisional applications, headquartered at Courbevoie in the Paris region
• INPI Decision n 2018-156 of 8 November 2018 (as modified) — the French standard for the presentation of patent application documents – what counts as a drawing, black line work, permitted shading, the 11-point lettering minimum, the no-text rule and reference-sign reciprocity
• European Patent Office — the route to European protection for Grenoble applicants, and the source of the 1 October 2025 colour and greyscale drawing reform at OJ EPO 2025, A49
• Unified Patent Court — hosts a local division in Paris and the seat of the central division there, which hears revocation actions against unitary and non-opted-out European patents

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