Frank Wanlass

Frank Marion Wanlass ( born May 17, 1933, Thatcher, Arizona; † 9 September 2010 in Santa Clara, California ) was an American electrical engineer.

Life and work

Wanlass grew up in Arizona and Utah and was in the Korean War in the Army Intelligence. He was in 1962 a PhD from the University of Utah with Henry Eyring in physics and then went to Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1963 he invented there, the CMOS technology, on which he got in 1967 a U.S. patent. The technique resulted in significantly lower power consumption compared to bipolar transistors ( in his former demonstration six orders of magnitude less, so a million times ) and formed the basis for the majority of the later transistor applications in integrated circuits ( first in digital watches ). In 1991 he was awarded the Solid State Circuits Award.

He left Fairchild in 1964. Thereafter he was involved in various business ventures (Four phase Zytrex, Standard Microsystems ). From 1970 he lived in California.

He married his first wife in 1957 and had four children from this marriage.