Appeal No. 1997-3161
Application No. 08/450,553
With respect to independent claims 43 and 51, the
Examiner, as the basis for the obviousness rejection, proposes
to modify the programming operation (equivalent to Appellant’s
erasing operation) in the EEPROM cell array of Haddad by
relying on Anderson to provide a teaching of applying a
negative potential to the source region in Haddad. In the
Examiner’s view (Answer, page 7), the skilled artisan would
have been motivated to forward bias the source region in
Haddad to enhance the flow of electrons into the floating gate
in view of the teachings of Anderson.
In response, Appellant asserts that the Examiner has
failed to set forth a prima facie case of obviousness since
proper motivation for one of ordinary skill to make the
Examiner’s proposed combination has not been established.
Upon careful review of the applied prior art, we are in
agreement with Appellant’s stated position in the Briefs. The
mere fact that the prior art may be modified in the manner
suggested by the Examiner does not make the modification
obvious unless the prior art suggested the desirability of the
modification. In re Fritch, 972 F. 2d 1260, 1266, 23 USPQ2d
1780, 1783-84 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
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