Appeal No. 1996-2284
Application No. 08/228,889
grounds, the first being that Mitome is not concerned with
correcting misalignments resulting from environmental effects
on the lens, as recited in the preamble of claims 1 and 5 and
also in the "whereby" clause in claim 1. This argument is
unconvincing because appellants have not explained why
Mitome's system will not inherently correct misalignments of
this type while it is correcting misalignment errors between
the reticle and the wafer. This argument is also inconvincing
with respect to claim 5 on the ground that the body of that
claim fails to specify that the misalignment to be corrected
is due environmental effects on the lens. The recitation to
this effect in the preamble of the claim is, in our view, a
statement of intended use and thus entitled to no weight. In
re Paulsen, 30 F.3d 1475, 1479-80, 31 USPQ2d 1671, 1673 (Fed.
Cir. 1994).
Appellants also characterize Mitome as "directed to
correcting positioning of the wafer" (Brief at 4). This
characterization is only partly correct; Mitome corrects the
positions of the reticle and the wafer. See col. 4, line 68
to col. 5, line 3 ("the processing unit 20 controls the
reticle driving system 21 and the wafer driving system 22 so
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