Appeal No. 1996-3194
Application 08/218,802
appellants. Although contacts 21-27 of DeBalko may apply a
force to the housing 31, these contacts would not apply a
force to retain the semiconductor components together as
recited in claim 1. The only contacts of DeBalko which can be
considered to apply a force as recited in claim 1 are the
contacts 42-44. As noted above, however, appellants argue
that these contacts and one of the case parts 20 and 54 are
not of unitary construction as claimed.
The examiner has interpreted the phrase “wherein the
force applying means and at least one of the first and second
case parts are of unitary construction” to be met by a
disclosure of the force applying means being of unitary
construction and either of the case parts separately being of
unitary construction. We agree with the examiner that this
interpretation is reasonable even though it is not what
appellants intended the phrase to mean. During prosecution,
claims are given their broadest reasonable interpretation
because an applicant has an opportunity to amend the claims to
properly cover only what was intended. In our view, claim 1
could have been easily amended to limit the scope of the claim
to what was intended. For example, the phrase quoted above
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