Appeal No. 95-3942
Application No. 08/008,976
6. A lithography process for defining features on a
workpiece comprising directing a beam of metastable rare gas
atoms onto a surface of a lithographic resist so that the
metastable rare gas atoms strike the surface of said lithographic
resist whereby internal energy of said metastable rare gas atoms
is released.
In the rejection of the appealed claim, the examiner relies
upon the following reference:
McMillan 4,746,799 May 24, 1988
Appellant relies upon the following reference as evidence of
nonobviousness:
Saita et al. (Saita) 4,974,227 Nov. 27, 1990
Appellant's claimed invention is directed to a lithographic
process which comprises exposing a lithographic resist to a
directed beam of metastable rare gas atoms. According to
appellant, the use of metastable rare gas atoms is an improvement
over the prior art use of visible, UV and X-ray radiation because
it allows for an exposed pattern of finer dimension. For
instance, whereas the smallest spot size attainable by visible
light, UV radiation and X-rays is 200-300 nm, about 100 nm and
about 30 nm, respectively, metastable rare gas atoms provide
small spot sizes on the order of 1.3 nm. Also, while the prior
art use of electrons and ions as exposing radiation results in
the smallest feature sizes of 2 nm and 20 nm, respectively, the
use of electrons and ions as exposing radiation does not allow
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