Appeal No. 2000-0038
Application 08/751,369
page 17) that Heming does not disclose the recited materials
other than SiO2 is irrelevant.
Claim 23
The appellants argue that Heming does not disclose
depositing the waveguide layer at low temperature using reactive
sputtering (brief, pages 17-18). Heming’s teachings that the
synthetic resin substrate is to be heated to a temperature which
is lower than its glass transition temperature (col. 3, lines 26-
27), and that some of the synthetic resins have long term usage
temperatures below 100ºC (col. 4, lines 25-26 and 51-54), would
have fairly suggested, to one of ordinary skill in the art,
carrying out any of the disclosed waveguide layer formation
processes, including ion-enhanced PVD (col. 6, line 18), at a
sufficiently low temperature, such as a temperature below 100ºC,
to avoid thermally damaging the synthetic resin substrate.
Claim 27
The appellants argue that Heming does not relate the
disclosure of low absorbance of the intermediate layer (col. 8,
lines 37-38) to the substrate characteristics (brief, page 18).
The appellants do not specify in their specification how much
lower the propagation attenuation of the intermediate layer must
be relative to that of the substrate to be “substantially lower”
9
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