Locate the Actual 1963 Complementary Mos Patent Filing Number Date and Fairchild Assignee

# Locate the Patent Filing: Number, Date, and Assignee

## 1. The Filing Itself: When, and Assigned to Whom

The complementary-MOS patent application was filed in 1963 and assigned to Fairchild Semiconductor, consistent with Wanlasss employment there and with standard practice for engineer-generated intellectual property at the company during this period. A filing date is not an issue date, and conflating the two is one of the most common small errors in casual retellings of this story; an application can sit in examination for years before a patent actually issues, and this one did.

## 2. Why the Filing-to-Issue Gap Matters to This Series Arc

The gap between the 1963 filing and the mid-1960s issuance matters because it sets a hard upper bound on when Fairchild, or any licensee, could have asserted enforceable patent rights against a competitor building complementary MOS devices; no one can be sued for infringing a claim that has not yet issued. That timing detail becomes directly relevant later in this series when the licensing and dormancy chapters ask why competitors were not aggressively blocked from exploring the same idea during the 1960s — part of the answer is simply that there was, for a period, no issued patent to enforce yet.