Appeal 2007-1394
Application 10/301,464
in In re Gurley, 27 F.3d 551, 553, 31 USPQ2d 1130, 1131 (Fed. Cir. 1994)
stated:
[a] reference may be said to teach away when a person of
ordinary skill, upon [examining] the reference, would be
discouraged from following the path set out in the reference, or
would be led in a direction divergent from the path that was
taken by the applicant.
Here, we do not find that the disclosure of the APA would discourage
one of ordinary skill in the art from the use of an edge ring of film material
of a size as recited in claims 8 and 19 rather than a film material that covers
a larger portion of the wafer pedestal plate. After all, as we noted above,
one of ordinary skill in the art confronted with the known problem of wafer
contamination by film material particles on contact with the wafer would
have recognized that reducing the area of contact of the film material with
the wafer would reduce the wafer contamination. The alternatively applied
Yang makes it clear that one of ordinary skill in the art was apprised of the
nature of this problem and the need for reducing the contact area of film
material employed on the wafer holder plate surface (Yang, col. 6, l. 66-col.
7, l. 4). As such, we are not persuaded by Appellants’ arguments of a
teaching away. As for the particular width of an edge contact ring of the
film material or other suitable material used, we agree with the Examiner
that the determination of workable/optimum size, including the width of the
wafer contact film material would have been reasonably expected to be
within the ordinary kill of the artisan upon routine experimentation. In re
Aller, 220 F.2d 454, 456, 105 USPQ 233, 235 (CCPA 1955) “[I]t is not
inventive to discover the optimum or workable ranges by routine
experimentation.”
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