Many power-electronics patents pair a converter with a control scheme, and the question for claim 1 is always which half carries the novelty. In US11018605B2, granted to L7 Drive Oy on May 25, 2021, both the CPC tags and the claim language say it is the control — specifically, a converter that varies its own gain to deliver whatever the motor is asking for.

The classification mixes converter and motor: H02M 3/1582 and 3/1584 (DC-DC step-up/down with regulation) sit alongside H02P 6/08 and H02P 7/292 (electronic motor control). That pairing is the tell — this is a converter fenced in the context of driving a motor or a variable load.

“According to an example aspect of the present invention, there is provided a DC to DC converter module for use between an electric power source and an electric motor.”— U.S. Patent No. 11,018,605 source

Claim 1 makes the control idea precise. The module sits “between an electric power source and an electric motor,” with input terminals taking a source voltage and output terminals feeding the motor, and — the load-bearing limitation — “control circuitry…having an input for receiving a signal indicative of a desired electric motor performance, wherein the control circuitry is configured to adjust a gain of the DC to DC converter in order to vary the output voltage based at least partially on the signal indicative of the desired electric motor performance.” The novelty is not the converter and not the motor; it is closing the loop directly from a performance command (what the motor should do) to the converter’s gain (how much voltage it delivers). Method claim 14 states the same idea cleanly: monitor a desired performance characteristic, “calculat[e] an output voltage which would arrive at the desired performance characteristic,” and command the converter to produce exactly that voltage.

The dependent claims make “desired performance” concrete and the architecture ambitious. The command is “indicative of a desired motor torque” (claim 8), “motor speed” (claim 9), or comes straight “from a throttle” (claim 10) — this is meant to live in a vehicle or actuator drive. Claim 2 lets the source be “a single battery cell,” and claim 3 puts “a plurality of DC to DC converters connected in parallel,” which together sketch a striking architecture: per-cell converters paralleled to build the drive voltage, rather than stacking cells into a high-voltage pack. Most telling is the chain from claim 5 to claim 7: add switches at the output (claim 5), control them with the converter to “output a modulated DC voltage” (claim 6), then use “at least three output terminals and at least three switches…to produce a rotating field at the output terminals such that an AC motor could be powered” (claim 7). In other words, the gain-controlled DC-DC stage is paired with a switch network that synthesizes three-phase drive — the converter and the inverter functions folded together. Claim 11 stacks “at least two stages” (input→intermediate→output); claim 12 lets the topology be “buck-boost, z-source [or] boost”; claim 13 outputs “a plurality of discrete output voltages.”

Reading the limitation, then, the converter topology itself is well-trodden prior art (buck-boost, boost, z-source are named generically), and the novelty has to be the control scheme — driving converter gain from a torque/speed/throttle command, optionally synthesizing the motor’s AC drive through an integrated switch network. Claim 1’s defensibility depends on how distinct that performance-command-to-gain regulation is over conventional motor-drive control, where a separate inverter, not a gain-varied DC-DC stage, normally does the work.

This is a representative specimen of a huge category: converter-plus-control patents where the control is the claim. They are the connective tissue of power electronics — incremental, specific, and individually modest, but collectively the substance of the field. For a grid-IP reader, they matter because the same techniques — per-cell converters, gain-controlled stages, integrated DC-DC/inverter switch networks — migrate directly into grid-tied converters and EV drivetrains.

The discipline: claim 1 owns a gain-control scheme for a converter feeding a motor, not DC-DC conversion and not motor control at large. It is a narrow fence on a regulation method, with the per-cell and three-phase-synthesis dependents marking where L7 Drive thinks the durable value sits. For the landscape, it is a 2021 data point reinforcing that the power-electronics IP that ultimately serves the grid is dominated by control-method claims layered on commodity topologies — the topology is the canvas, the control is the patent.

The integrated DC-DC-plus-switch-network chain (claims 5 through 7) is worth lingering on, because it is the most distinctive thing in the file and it inverts the usual drivetrain architecture. Conventionally, a motor drive uses a DC-DC stage to set a DC-link voltage and a separate three-phase inverter to commutate that voltage into a rotating field. Claim 7 instead has the converter’s own output switches “produce a rotating field at the output terminals such that an AC motor could be powered” — folding the inverter function into the gain-controlled converter so that varying the converter’s gain and the switch timing together is the motor control. Pair that with claim 2’s “single battery cell” source and claim 3’s parallel converters, and a radical packaging idea emerges: rather than wiring many cells in series to reach drive voltage and then chopping it down, you put a small gain-controlled converter on each low-voltage cell and parallel their outputs, building the drive waveform from many low-voltage stages. That has real implications for a battery system — it sidesteps the cell-balancing and high-voltage-isolation headaches of long series strings, and it degrades gracefully when a cell weakens because the controller can re-weight the per-cell converters. Whether the claim is broad enough to capture that vision or narrow enough to be easily designed around turns on how a court would read “a signal indicative of a desired electric motor performance” driving “a gain of the DC to DC converter” — the throttle/torque/speed dependents (claims 8–10) suggest an automotive target, but nothing in the independent claim limits it there. For a grid reader, the transferable lesson is concrete: distributed, per-cell, gain-controlled conversion is the same idea that makes module-level solar electronics and modular battery converters attractive, and the control method is where the protectable cleverness lives.