Appeal No. 2005-1098
Application No. 10/319,149
For the foregoing reasons and those stated in the Brief, we
determine that the examiner has failed to meet the burden of
establishing that one of ordinary skill in this art would not
have been apprised of the scope of the language recited in claim
1 on appeal. Therefore we reverse the examiner’s rejection of
claims 1-12 under the second paragraph of section 112.
B. The Rejections under § 103(a)
With regard to the rejection over Kao in view of Pernyeszi,
the examiner finds that Kao discloses a method of forming a light
shield layer on an integrated circuit where light is blocked by
an opaque metal layer 22 (Answer, paragraph bridging pages 3-4).
The examiner apparently recognizes that Kao fails to disclose or
suggest that the photon-blocking layer is below the PMD layer
since the examiner applies Pernyeszi to show that a photon
blocking layer “should be applied directly on the IC [integrated
circuit]” (Answer, page 4). From these findings, the examiner
concludes that it would have been obvious to modify the Kao
structure to provide the photon blocking layer directly on the IC
as shown by Pernyeszi “to provide it in the ideal place” (id.).
We determine that the examiner has failed to establish a
case of prima facie obviousness for several reasons. The
examiner finds that Kao discloses the shield is above layers 33
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