Appeal No. 1999-2584
Application No. 08/562,988
the modification obvious unless the prior art suggested the
desirability of the modification. In re Fritch, 972 F.2d
1260, 1266 n.14, 23 USPQ2d 1780, 1783-84 n.14 (Fed. Cir.
1992).
Accordingly, since the Examiner has not established a prima
facie case of obviousness, the 35 U.S.C. § 103 rejection of
appealed claims 7-12 is not sustained.
Rejection under 37 CFR § 1.196(b)
We make the following new ground of rejection using our
authority under 37 CFR § 1.196(b). Claims 7-11 are rejected
under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) as being anticipated by Phipps which,
as illustrated in Figure 2, discloses a power MOSFET device
with the requisite resistance 29 connected between the gate
node 20 and source node 21. In making this rejection, we have
construed the transitional phrase “consisting essentially of”
in claim 7 as equivalent to the open-ended term “comprising”
which does not exclude any additional elements such as the
drain-gate zener diodes in Phipps. In our view, the zener1
In contrast to claim 7, independent claim 12 utilizes the closed-ended1
transitional phrase “consisting of” which excludes any elements not present in
the claim.
7
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