Appeal No. 96-3475
Application 08/245,775
The appealed claims stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over admitted
prior art (specification, page 2, lines 7-11) in view of Chen.
We agree with the examiner’s conclusion that the claimed subject matter on appeal would
have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art. However, because our analysis of the
prior art is based on a more comprehensive review of the record including, inter alia , the
disclosure of application 08/027,314 which matured into U.S. Patent No. 5,346,852 to Gedridge2
and because we rely on a rationale substantially different from that expressed by the examiner, we
denominate our affirmance of the stated rejection as involving a new rejection (37 CFR § 196(b)).
The subject matter on appeal, in general, relates to the doping of semiconductor materials,
and more particularly, to the use of triisopropylindium as a dopant precursor in the chemical
vapor deposition of Group II/Group VI semiconductor materials. By way of background in the
"related art" section of the specification (pages 1-3), appellants indicate that the II/VI
semiconductor materials such as mercury cadmium telluride have been used commercially as
infrared detectors and infrared emitters . Such applications of the II/VI semiconductor materials
have required controlled extrinsic doping of both the p-type and n-type semiconductor materials.
According to appellants, low level doping of the n-type mercury cadmium telluride in the range
14 3 15 3
of 10 atoms per cm to 10 atoms per cm has remained a problem in the art. Thus when
2The disclosures of this document are discussed in the specification at page 2, lines 12-18.
The Gedridge patent which issued from this application is prior art under 35 U.S.C. § 102 (e).
3
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