Appeal No. 2003-0270
Application 09/087,234
undensified porous sublayer is relatively porous because its
shrinkage during drying is controlled by use of a surface
modification step, whereas the shrinkage of the densified porous
sublayer is not controlled (col. 7, lines 1-18). The teaching
that the densified porous sublayer is densified by shrinking
during drying indicates that the pores of this shrunken layer are
smaller than those of the undensified porous layer. The
illustration of the dielectric structure (figure 2), and the
disclosure that the densified porous sublayer can extend far
enough above conductors (24) to serve as an interlayer dielectric
(col. 7, lines 20-22), indicate that the small pores in the
densified porous sublayer extend a distance of at least 2D from
the dielectric structure surface, where D is the average pore
diameter of the dielectric structure. Also, the 20% porosity of
the densified porous sublayer is less than about half the
porosity of the undensified porous sublayer, which is greater
than 75%. Gnade’s dielectric structure, therefore, reasonably
appears to fall within the scope of the appellants’ claim 4.
The appellants argue that Gnade teaches (col. 3, lines 59-
62) that the pores have a preferred pore size without regard to
the porosity and that the porosity relates to the number of pores
and not the pore size (brief, page 3). Gnade’s disclosed average
-8-8
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