Appeal No. 1998-1663
Application No. 08/508,408
not preclude the sputtering of a titanium film and the oxidation of
the film in one step. This is exactly what occurs in Finley or
Khanna.
In addition, appealed claim 9 does not recite the term “after”
or “thereafter” as the appellants seem to think. In re Morris, 127
F.3d 1048, 1056, 44 USPQ2d 1023, 1029 (Fed. Cir. 1997) (“It is the
applicants’ burden to precisely define the invention, not the
PTO’s.”).
According to the appellants’ specification, “[t]he amount of
reactive gas is kept sufficiently low so that the sputtering mode is
essentially metallic, and the film deposited is essentially
metallic.” (Underscoring added; page 14.) The term “essentially”
would indicate to one skilled in the relevant art that in the
broadest reasonable interpretation of appealed claim 9, the film
deposited by sputtering includes not only purely metallic but also
metal oxide films. Where the film deposited by sputtering is a metal
oxide, the oxidizing step would have occurred during the sputtering
step as in Finley or Khanna. In our view, the use of the term
“titanium film” as it appears in appealed claim 9 is purely a matter
of semantics, as one skilled in the relevant art would understand
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