Appeal No. 2001-1559
Application No. 09/237,174
Examiner’s reasoning and the appeal brief (Paper No. 13, filed
October 11, 2000) for Appellants’ arguments thereagainst.
OPINION
At the outset, we note that Appellants state that the claims
stand or fall with claim 1 (brief, page 9). Thus, we will
consider the claims as one group and treat claim 1 as the
representative claim of the group.
The Examiner relies on the teachings of Sasaki related to
forming a trench with deep and shallow regions and concludes that
the claimed ratio of the insulation material growth rate and the
relationship of the trench width to its depth would have been
obvious through routine experimentation (answer, page 4). The
Examiner further relies on Bohr and Kameyama for the deep and
shallow trench portions (answer, page 4) and on the admitted
prior art for using trench technology for isolating sections of
buried layer (answer, page 5). Finally, the Examiner adds
teachings related to deep trench isolation from Bertagnolli
(id.).
Appellants argue that the claimed method step of filling the
trench with silicon oxide insulation material in an ozone-
activated CVD process and achieving the claimed selective growth
are neither taught nor suggested by the cited prior art (oral
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