Appeal No. 96-1508
Application No. 08/112,445
claimed “guard wall” are not guard walls at all, but, rather
are diffused regions in the semiconductor device of Yasunari.
Lee, employed by the examiner for its teaching of certain
contact holes and the notoriety of aluminum for not forming
continuous layers over sidewalls, is not seen to remedy the
deficiency of the primary reference. Similarly, the
examiner’s identification of Mihara’s teaching of a guard
ring, shown in Figure 9 as a mask pattern having “cross
sections” also does not provide for the deficiency of
Yasunari.
Since the guard rings of the applied references are all
diffused regions, which, by our understanding, are physically
inseparable from the substrates into which they are diffused,
such diffused regions, or guard rings, cannot reasonably be
considered to be equivalent to the claimed guard wall since
the diffused regions cannot constitute “filling material,” as
claimed. Further, a diffused region would not have a “guard
wall opening” since there was no opening in a dielectric layer
which was filled but, rather, a diffusion of one material into
another. Accordingly, although similar in name, we do not
find the “guard rings” disclosed by the applied references to
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