Appeal No. 2002-0974
Application 09/332,745
to the hypothetical person of ordinary skill in the art at the
time appellants' made their invention.
THE REJECTION OF CLAIMS 9 THROUGH 38
Appellants argue that claim 9 requires a wafer exhibiting
"an average light scattering event concentration of at least
0.5/cm2" and that no reference discloses starting with a wafer
having this property. We disagree. We consider the limitation in
claim 9 concerning the minimum concentration of light scattering
events on the surface of the wafer at the beginning of the
process to be inherent in the wafers disclosed by Asayama et al.
for use in their process. Specifically, appellants disclose at
page 8, lines 19 through 21 of their specification that:
The wafer starting material preferably is a single crystal
silicon wafer which has been sliced from a single crystal
ingot grown in accordance with any of the conventional
variations of the Cz crystal growing method.
These are the so-called "void-rich wafer" materials to which
appellants refer in their specification and which contain a
relatively large number of "vacancy agglomerates" (see page 1,
lines 17 through 25 and page 10, lines 3 through 23). When these
"agglomerates" are found at the surface of the wafer, they appear
in the form of COP's and the COP's are detected as "light
scattering events" on the surface. According to appellants:
Void-rich wafers are particularly preferred starting
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