Patents Patent law protects elements of chip designs, production processes and combinations of virtual components that are useful, novel and non-obvious. To be novel, a U.S. patent applicant must be the first person to invent the subject matter of a patent. A patent owner has the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, the claimed invention in the U.S. without a license. A patent owner is not required to grant any license. Patents have a term of 20 years from the date the application is filed.
Protection begins only when the patent issues.
Patents are considered the strongest form of intellectual property because independent creation is not a defense to an infringement claim. Patents are time-consuming and expensive to obtain, causing many companies to seek patent protection only for strategically important inventions. The Chip Act essentially protects the topology of mask works fixed in a chip. A work must be original and not consist simply of designs that are staple, commonplace or familiar in the semiconductor industry or be variations of such designs combined in such a way that considered as a whole, they are not original. Protection does not include any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, or discovery, embodied in the mask work.