Appeal No. 95-5142
Application 08/078,917
This is an appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134 from the
examiner's final rejection of claims 1-7, all of Appellant's
pending claims, under § 103. We reverse.
The invention is described in Appellant's specification
as an improvement on the prior art transducer shown in
Appellant's
Figure 1, which shows an MR (magnetoresistive) read transducer
20 as disclosed in Krounbi et al. U.S. Patent 5,018,037
(Krounbi). The prior art structure is described in
Appellant's specification as follows (at 3, lines 10-23):
A central active layer area region 16 is composed of a
soft adjacent layer 2 separated from an MR layer 6 by a
nonmagnetic spacer layer 4. Passive end regions 18 each
include a hard magnetic biasing layer 10 and a conductive
layer 8. The central active region is defined by the
space between the passive end regions 18.
End regions 18 produce a longitudinal bias field,
while a transverse bias field is produced in at least
part of the central active region 16. Transverse biasing
occurs when a sense current passes through soft adjacent
layer 2. The biasing at least partially compensates for
hysteresis effects, thereby improving linearity and
sensitivity of the signal generated in the transducer.
Krounbi explains that it is necessary to provide both
longitudinal and transverse biasing of the MR layer in order
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