Appeal No. 1997-3979
Application No. 08/586,365
traditional process (see, for example,
Applicant's specification, page 1, lines
14-18). [Brief at 7.]
This argument fails to take into account that the artisan may
have been willing to increase the number of process steps in
order to obtain a thinner base region and better transistor
performance. See Winner Int'l Royalty Corp. v. Wang, 202 F.3d
1340, 1349 n.8, 53 USPQ2d 1580, 1587 n.8 (Fed. Cir. 2000)
("The fact that the motivating benefit comes at the expense of
another benefit, however, should not nullify its use as a
basis to modify the disclosure of one reference with the
teachings of another. Instead, the benefits, both lost and
gained, should be weighed against one another.").
Appellant's other unpersuasive argument is that Doki's
technique requires a second annealing at a temperature of 900
degrees C to form the source and drain regions of the MOS
transistor (col. 6, lines 43-49) and that such thermal
annealing would adversely impact any bipolar devices, as noted
in appellant's specification at 5, second full paragraph.
This argument is unconvincing because the rejection does not
rely on Doki's disclosed technique for forming shallow source
and drain regions in a MOS transistor. Instead, the
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