Appeal No. 96-1707
Application 08/221,999
stacked head arrangement. (See specification at pages 6-7.) The admitted prior art
recognizes that the stacked two head orientation has problems and would have motivated
the skilled artisan to planarize the two head arrangement. To improve the yields, it would
have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to reduce
the number of layers thereby reducing the manufacturing costs. (See answer at pages 6-7.)
The skilled artisan would have found the teachings of Jones which teaches the planarizing
of a single head device with transmission of the signal using a second gap to a second
portion of the single head, linearly spaced from the portion closest to the signal source.
Jones also discusses some of the manufacturing considerations and benefits achieved by
the planar structured device. Jones teaches the skilled artisan that the signal may be
picked up from the tape and transmitted a distance to a second area within the transducer.
The skilled artisan would have recognized that Jones teaches a single head device where
the gap size would have been the same due to the single head. It would have been
obvious to one of
ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to know that the same basic structure
may be used for a two head device as a means of transmitting the signal to the second
head farthest from the source. The skilled artisan would have also known that the type of
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