Appeal No. 1999-2712 Page 12
Application No. 08/165,082
field of the applicant's endeavor or, if not, then be reasonably pertinent to the particular problem with
which the inventor was concerned.” See also In re Deminski, 796 F.2d 436, 442, 230 USPQ 313,
315 (Fed. Cir. 1986). In addition, the court stated in In re Clay, 966 F.2d 656, 659, 23 USPQ2d
1058, 1061 (Fed. Cir. 1992) that “[a] reference is reasonably pertinent if, even though it may be in a
different field from that of the inventor's endeavor, it is one which, because of the matter with which it
deals, logically would have commended itself to an inventor's attention in considering his problem.” See
also Wang Laboratories Inc. v. Toshiba Corp., 993 F.2d 858, 864, 26 USPQ2d 1767, 1773
(Fed. Cir. 1993). We find that based upon the specific facts of this case, Brandmayr is reasonably
pertinent to the problem with which the inventor was concerned because the matter with which it deals,
e.g., fabrication of capacitors with a BST layer interposed between two electrodes, logically would
have commended itself to an inventor's attention in considering his problem. In the present instance, we
are informed by the appellants’ specification (pages 1 and 2) in the Background of the Invention that
“while the dielectric constant of bulk BST is of the order of 300 to 4000, the dielectric constant of thin
films made according to the conventional processes is slightly lower. In addition, appellants’
specification (page 10) describes the graphs shown in Figure 6, stating “[i]t is seen that the real part of
the dielectric constant reaches a peak of nearly 500 at a value of x = 0.3 as with bulk BST, and that the
curve otherwise almost exactly follows the curve for bulk BST.” Brandmayr teaches fabricating bulk
ceramic capacitors having a dielectric formed of BST, and thus falls at least into the latter category of
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