Frank Wanlass

Who was Frank Wanlass?

Frank Marion Wanlass was an American electrical engineer. He obtained his PhD from the University of Utah. He invented CMOS logic circuits in 1963 while working at Fairchild Semiconductor. He was given U.S. patent #3,356,858 for "Low Stand-By Power Complementary Field Effect Circuitry" in 1967.

In 1964, Wanlass moved to General Microelectronics, where he made the first commercial MOS integrated circuits, and a year later to General Instrument Microelectronics Division in New York, where he developed four-phase logic.

He was also remembered for his contribution to solving threshold voltage stability in MOS transistors due to sodium ion drift.

In 1991, Wanlass was awarded the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Award.