Appeal No. 2001-2146
Application No. 09/270,588
OPINION
We have carefully considered all of the arguments advanced by the appellants and the
examiner and agree with the appellants that the rejections of the claims under §103(a) are
not well founded. Accordingly, we reverse these rejections.
The Rejections under § 103(a)
"[T]he examiner bears the initial burden, on review of the prior art or on any other
ground, of presenting a prima facie case of unpatentability." See In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d
1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992). The examiner relies upon two
separate rejections encompassing at least three references to reject the claimed subject matter
and establish a prima facie case of obviousness.
It is the examiner’s position that Liao does not teach photoexposing the processed
pattern mask, Answer page 3, and neither Liao nor Wright teaches stripping a photoresist
layer with a solvent. See Answer page 4. Moreover the examiner states that, “[i]n a
photoresist patterning method, Miyashita teach that oxygen plasma and solvent stripping are
equivalents. Hence, a person of ordinary skill in the art, at the time of the invention, would
have found it obvious to strip the photoresist with a solvent because substitution of one
equivalent for the other would have been expected to produce an expected result.” Id. We
disagree with the examiner’s analysis.
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