It has been proposed that main path analysis can be used to identify technological trajectories in patent-citation networks. In this paper, the method is applied to a network composed of one million US patents and eight million citations in order to trace the backbone of the technological trajectory of the semiconductor manufacturing industry. An in depth discussion of the method is presented, focusing on the many parameters that can be adjusted while applying it and on the consequences of adjusting any of them. Moreover, and differently from other papers on the subject, the result of the algorithm is analysed to determine if it indeed represents the most important technological contributions to the trajectory or if it is merely a collection of relevant and connected patents. This is made easier by the fact that the semiconductor industry has a clear and widely known technological trajectory that spans more than 50 years, Moore's law.

有人提出，主路径分析可用于识别专利引用网络中的技术轨迹。在本文中，该方法应用于由 100 万美国专利和 800 万引用组成的网络，以追溯半导体制造行业的技术轨迹骨干。介绍了对该方法的深入讨论，重点是在应用它时可以调整的许多参数以及调整其中任何一个的结果。此外，与该主题的其他论文不同的是，对算法的结果进行分析以确定它是否确实代表了对轨迹最重要的技术贡献，或者它是否仅仅是相关和相关专利的集合。