Appeal No. 96-1805
Application 08/200,432
without Goesele. The "admitted prior art" designated by the
examiner constitutes portions of the appellants' specification on
pages 2 and 8, and the system shown in Figures 4A through 4D. It
is here that the appellants discuss methods of bonding utilized
in the prior art, and the problems which the appellants believe
remain unsolved by them, including the elimination of gas bubbles
between the bonded wafers, which is the objective of their
invention. Insofar as the requirements set forth in the preamble
of claim 1 are concerned, the admitted prior art fails to
disclose a chamber with a gas inlet and a gas outlet, as well as
a second chuck for holding the second wafer and moving it to the
first wafer. The admitted prior art also fails to teach the
steps of setting a pressure of gas below atmospheric pressure
between the first and second wafers before starting a sticking of
the wafers, and filling a space between the first and second
wafers before the start of sticking of surfaces of the wafers
with a gas having a lower viscosity than air. These inadequacies
are admitted by the examiner on page 6 of the Answer.
It is the examiner's position that one of ordinary skill in
the art would have understood that some means was necessary for
holding the second of the two wafers shown in the appellants'
6
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007