Appeal No. 1997-1006
Application 08/184,718
Claims 9-11 and 21-23 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103 as being unpatentable over Pickering.
We refer to the Final Rejection (Paper No. 10) and the
Examiner's Answer (Paper No. 16) (pages referred to as "EA__")
for a statement of the Examiner's position and to the Appeal
Brief (Paper No. 14) (pages referred to as "Br__") for a
statement of Appellants' arguments thereagainst.
OPINION
The claims are argued to stand or fall together (Br3).
Claim 13 is taken as representative.
The claims are very broad in that they recite a product
having a certain surface roughness and do not recite the
process steps for producing the claimed surface roughness.
Nevertheless, nothing precludes claiming of the product.
Pickering discloses (col. 4, lines 12-16):
The present invention provides free-standing, cubic
($) phase SiC which is highly polishable, i.e., about 5 Å
RMS or less, preferable [sic] about 3 Å RMS or less, and
most preferably about 1 Å RMS or less as measured on a
Talystep mechanical contact profiler. Herein, unless
otherwise noted, polishability values are as measured on
a Talystep mechanical contact profiler. The value of
surface roughness (polishability) may vary significantly
depending upon the measurement technique. For example,
surfaces measured to be 1 Å RMS on a Talystep mechanical
contact profiler would measure lower on a Zygo heterodyne
profiler and larger on an atomic force microscope.
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