Appeal No. 96-2170
Application 08/236,570
case of obviousness under 35 U.S.C. § 103, it is incumbent upon
the examiner to provide a reason why one of ordinary skill in the
art would have been led to modify a prior art reference or to
combine reference teachings to arrive at the claimed invention.
See Ex parte Clapp, 227 USPQ 972, 973 (Bd. of Pat. App. & Int.
1985). To this end, the requisite motivation must stem from some
teaching, suggestion or inference in the prior art as a whole or
from the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill
in the art and not from the appellant's disclosure. See, for
example, Uniroyal, Inc. v. Rudkin-Wiley Corp., 837 F.2d 1044,
1052, 5 USPQ2d 1434, 1052 (Fed. Cir.), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825
(1988).
It is our view that the combined teachings of the prior art
relied upon fail to suggest that a low surface energy covering be
applied to both the upstream bar and the downstream bar of a die
coating apparatus of the type claimed. The Japanese reference
discloses several embodiments of die coating devices having only
an upstream bar (Figures 1 through 4), and one embodiment having
both an upstream bar and a downstream bar (Figure 5). A low
surface energy covering is illustrated upon the surface of the
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