Appeal No. 1997-3730
Application No. 08/095,147
retainer. The Examiner has provided no indication as to how
and where the skilled artisan might have found it obvious to
modify the teachings of Singer, Lee, and Harrington to arrive
at the claimed invention. 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).
With respect to the Tai and Dean references, we note that
these references were applied by the Examiner as disclosing
the rf power and retainer clip features, respectively, of the
appealed claims. We find no disclosure in either of these
references that would overcome the innate deficiencies of
Singer, Lee, and Harrington discussed supra. Accordingly,
since the Examiner has not established a prima facie case of
obviousness, the rejection of independent claims 1 and 7, and
claims 2 to 6 and 8 to 12 dependent thereon, is not sustained.
We now turn to a discussion of independent claim 13 which
is directed to the embodiment in which the claimed diode is
placed between a ground terminal and the anode, rather than
10
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