Connectors are politics, but they are also physics, and Eaton's grant US11167655B2, "Charging station and connector therefor" (issued November 9, 2021), is firmly on the physics side. What makes this a useful teardown is that the CPC pairs charging classes (B60L 53/30, 53/16) with H01R connector-hardware classes — H01R 13/641 (contact-arrangement keying), 13/665 (electrically-connected contacts), 13/7175 (coupling parts with switches). The independent claim's value is in the contact and shielding architecture, not the abstract idea of charging.
That is the right place for a power-management company like Eaton to hold IP. As charging power climbed, the connector became a thermal and safety chokepoint — contacts that arc, overheat, or mis-seat are real failure modes. A grant that claims a specific contact arrangement with switching and shielding features reads on a concrete, manufacturable part, which is exactly the kind of claim that is both defensible and licensable because it maps to physical hardware rather than software behavior.
On scope, separate the independent claim from the dependents. The independent recitation establishes the station-connector combination; the dependents that specify the contact geometry, the keying, and the switch integration are the moat. Those H01R-classified dependents are hard to design around precisely because they describe a physical interface, and physical-interface claims tend to survive challenge better than functional ones.
Dated November 2021, this grant arrives in the thick of the connector-standard wars, before the industry consolidated around a dominant plug. Eaton's bet is on the hardware layer of charging — the part that has to carry the current safely — rather than on the standard itself. Read the claims, not the abstract: what Eaton obtained is a position on connector contacts and shielding, the unglamorous components that determine whether a fast charger is safe at full power.