Appeal No. 1996-3121
Application No. 08/115,783
raised by the examiner’s obviousness rejection of appealed
claim 1 is whether or not a person of ordinary skill in this
art would have been led to utilize an isotopically pure source
of carbon as required by appellants’ claim in the prior art
microwave enhanced CVD process described by Yamazaki. For the
reasons below, we answer this question in the affirmative.
Seitz, the “secondary reference” relied upon by the
examiner, discloses that the thermal conductivity of synthetic
diamond can be enhanced by growing the diamond “from only one
or the other of the isotopes of carbon 12 and carbon 13". See
column 2, lines 19-24 of Seitz. Appellants point out that
Seitz relates to a super high pressure method for forming
synthetic diamond, because “[T]he diamond of Seitz seems to 7
be produced by the method described in the Strong... article”.
See pages 2-4 of appellants’ reply brief filed on February 28,
1995. Accordingly, appellants argue that there is no
justifiable motivation “for combining a super high pressure
method with a low pressure CVD method”. See the brief at page
10. On the other hand, we note that although Yamazaki is
7See footnote 1 of this decision.
8
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