Appeal No. 1998-0129 Page 10
Application No. 08/438,062
We therefore, conclude that the examiner has established
a prima facie case of obviousness of the invention. As the
examiner has met the burden of establishing a prima facie
case, the burden now shifts to the appellants to overcome the
prima facie case with argument and/or evidence. Obviousness
will then be determined on the basis of the evidence as a
whole.
Appellants have submitted three declarations under 37 2
CFR § 1.132. The first is the Declaration of Masamichi Azuma
(Azuma Declaration) . The second is the Declaration of Larry3
D. McMillan (McMillan Declaration). The McMillan Declaration
is directed to the issue of capacitance stability at high
frequencies, which is set forth in claims 25-27. Accordingly,
our evaluation of the McMillan Declaration will be discussed
in our review of claims 25-27, appearing later in this
2 All three Declarations were filed on July 22, 1996 (Paper No. 6).
3Although of record in the application, the Azuma Declaration has not
been referred to by either appellants or the examiner. We note that the Azuma
Declaration is only directed to the issue of whether two references cited in
the parent application (which are not applied against the claims of this
application) should have been included in an IDS. Accordingly, we will not
further address the Azuma Declaration.
Page: Previous 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007