Appeal No. 1997-3979
Application No. 08/586,365
claim 8. The examiner has not explained, and it is not
apparent to us, why the artisan would have understood Eklund
to be teaching that his emitter region 89 can be made thin
enough that his p-type region 61 can have a peak doping
concentration which is less than 700D from the surface.
For the foregoing reasons, the § 103 rejection of
claim 8 over Eklund in view of Doki therefore is reversed, as
is the § 103 rejection of dependent claims 9 and 10 over those
references.
We note in passing that appellant makes several
other arguments that are not persuasive. The first is that
whereas Eklund forms his base region 61 by implanting boron
through the oxide layer 60 (col. 4, lines 12-17, citing
application Serial No. 07/129,271), Doki's base-region
formation technique requires more steps because part of the
oxide layer 40 is removed to form an opening 39 (Fig. 8A)
through which the base layer is created (col. 6, lines 60-68).
According to appellant,
[a] person building BiCMOS devices would not
have been motivated to add such additional
masking steps to form a shallow junction, as
they are motivated to reduce - or at least not
increase - the number of masking steps in a
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