DENVER (AP) — The federal government was expected to announce Monday that Denver, Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, and San Jose, Calif., will each receive a new U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The new locations mark the first expansion of the suburban Virginia-based office, which has a backlog of 620,000 pending patents and gets 500,000 new applications each year, The Denver Post (http://bit.ly/MlPvmm) reported. Because of the heavy workload, it can take three years for the office to approve a patent.