Appeal No. 1998-0338
Application No. 08/350,865
and who had before him in his workshop the prior art, would
have been reasonably expected to use the solution that is
claimed by the Appellants.
We find that those skilled in the art having the
teachings of APA and Nishimoto before them would not have put
slits in the lower metal plate.
First, Appellant claims to have discovered the problem.
The Examiner has not contested this, nor shown cracking in a
bonding pad to be a known problem in the prior art.
Second, even if bonding pad cracks were known in the
prior art, we see no motivation to apply Nishimoto’s
passivation layer cracking solution to bonding pads.
Nishimoto’s solution is to reduce the effective width of the
underlying wiring bus. We are not convinced that one of
ordinary skill in the art, seeing Nishimoto, would decide to
reduce the effective width of the lower metal plate in the
bonding pad of APA.
Third, Nishimoto’s bonding pad does not have slits, and
this may well be because the pad has no passivation layer to
crack. On the other hand, APA has a passivation layer, but
the cracking problem does not appear in this layer.
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