nanoREV.

Nano-FETs Patent Interferences

The semiconductor and electronics industry has a serious problem when it comes to patent thickets in which a multitude of different corporations or other patent holding entities each have overlapping patents related to different components of a particular product making commercialization difficult. Nanotechnology patents share and may even amplify this problem due to the cross-disciplinary nature of certain nanomaterials and the relatively large fraction of university held nanotechnology patents for which cross-licensing strategies may be moot since universities do not usually generate products and thus are not subject to infringement of a corporations patents.

One particularly interesting example of overlapping patents relevant to future nanoelectronics is the case of US Patent 6,740,910 held by Infineon Technologies and US Patent 6,566,704 held by Samsung Electronics. Both these patents deal with basic vertical channel FET designs in which nanowire of nanotube material form the channel portions. According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors nanowires and/or nanotubes are likely to start appearing in transistor designs by 2012 and the vertical channel design may potentially be the last hurrah for MOSFET transistors which currently dominates electronics. Infineon’s patent (filed Jan. 28 2003 in the U.S. and covering both carbon nanotube and nanowire channels) appears to have the broader patent claims to this design but Samsung’s patent (limited to carbon nanotubes) has the earlier U.S. filing date (June 27, 2001). During the U.S. examination Samsung’s patent was initially used against Infineon’s patent application but Infineon was able to claim earlier foreign priority to July 28, 2000.  Lacking an interference proceeding it is unclear as to whether Infineon or Samsung has ultimate priority but, if the incorporation of nanowires and nanotubes into transistor structures becomes a necessity to maintain Moore’s law, it is likely that one or both of Infineon and Samsung will be in a fairly powerful position in the next decade.�