It depends entirely on your field. I spent most of my career as an engineer working on R&D for software that would likely sit in a baseband in a production implementation. We spent millions of dollars building it, and nothing comparable is publicly available. The secret sauce in a baseband is definitely the sort of thing that's in short supply. And it's software.
That said, the patent office may not be qualified to distinguish between something that someone whipped together and something that took a team of PhDs years to invent. And maybe that problem is an intractable one.
That said, the patent office may not be qualified to distinguish between something that someone whipped together and something that took a team of PhDs years to invent. And maybe that problem is an intractable one.