The Brainchip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN) share price is pushing higher on Wednesday.
In morning trade, the struggling semiconductor company's shares are up 11% to 41 cents.
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Why is the Brainchip share price rising?
Investors have been bidding the beaten-down Brainchip share price higher today after the company released a rare spot of positive news.
According to the release, the company has been issued another patent in the United States, which it believes strengthens its patent portfolio and demonstrates its apparent competitive research strength.
Brainchip's portfolio now comprises 17 issued patents.
What is the patent?
The release reveals that the patent, US 11,704,549, was issued on 18 July at the US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO).
It is considered by the company to be a "valuable" intellectual property asset that protects its approach to learning on a neuromorphic chip or a system.
The company highlights that the patent protects Brainchip's neuromorphic processor, which is configured to perform convolutions on digital input data that has been converted into spikes.
It also broadens the scope of protection already granted to Brainchip in one of its earlier patents, which it feels further enhances the commercial value of the patent.
In addition, management notes that the patent safeguards the feature of reconfigurability in a neural processor, which can function as either a convolutional neural processor or a fully connected neural processor.
This reconfigurability apparently provides a significant advantage, enabling the development of multipurpose and cost-effective hardware designs such as the Akida.
While this will be good news if Brainchip develops a product that the world wants, it hasn't been looking good on the commercial front over the last 12 months. Earlier this year management essentially admitted that its much-hyped first iteration was a flop and is now working on its new offering.
The Brainchip share price is down ~60% over the last 12 months.
