We report on the fabrication and the characterization of a tunable complementary-metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) system consisting of two quantum dots and a MOS single electron transistor (MOSSET) charge sensor. By exploiting a compact T-shaped design and few gates fabricated by electron beam lithography, the MOSSET senses the charge state of either a single or double quantum dot at 4.2 K. The CMOS compatible fabrication process, the simplified control over the number of quantum dots and the scalable geometry make such architecture exploitable for large scale fabrication of multiple spin-based qubits in circuital quantum information processing.