Appeal No. 96-0357
Application No. 08/200,850
Claims 1 through 8 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103
as being unpatentable over Thomas in view of Tsukagoshi.
Reference is made to the brief and the answer for the
respective positions of the appellant and the examiner.
OPINION
We have carefully considered the entire record before us,
and we will reverse all of the rejections.
Turning first to the 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) rejection, the
examiner states (Answer, page 3) that:
In figure 4, Thomas et al. disclose a contact
for a semiconductor device including a plurality of
compressible, flexible conductive balls (106, 108,
110, 112), in an “nxn” array, n being a whole number
greater than 1 (such as 32, see column 6, lines 26-
44 and column 10, lines 26-43), each “nxn” forming a
single contact (see figure 5); and a “flattened”
area on each conductive ball (106, 108, 110, 112)
secured to the semiconductor device (80 and 100).
Appellant argues (Brief, page 3) that Thomas “lacks any
teachings of using flexible balls to construct a contact for a
semiconductor device.” We agree. Thomas uses one metallic
4
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