Appeal No. 1998-0036 Page 4
Application No. 08/431,203
Claim 1 is directed to a coating process. The Examiner has rejected the subject matter of this
claim as unpatentable as obvious over the combination of Swisher, Lindsay, Sartor and Ho. As
discussed in the Answer at pages 4-6, Swisher describes a process including steps of positioning a
polymeric film in a vacuum system (vacuum chamber 16; Fig. 1) which is outgassed to a pressure of 3
to 30 mTorr (col. 11, lines 36-38), delivering the film to a plasma treatment station 11 operated at a
pressure of about 30 to 150 mTorr (col. 11, lines 26-30), bombarding the organic film with plasma in
the evacuated plasma chamber (col. 6, lines 19-32), moving the film to a coating roll 17 and vacuum
metallizing a layer of metal onto the film in the lower vacuum chamber 18 (col. 9, lines 15-48; col. 11,
lines 39-47). Polyimide is the preferred film material (col. 7, lines 1-2). Examples 8-59 exemplify the
use of the process to form polyimide film-copper laminates.
Swisher recognizes that drying of the film occurs during the plasma treatment. At column 6,
lines 32-38, Swisher discloses that:
The plasma treatment can also cause the film material to be dried or cleaned of
materials that can interfere in the vacuum metallization or later formation of metal
coatings onto the film surface. The temperatures and pressures common in plasma
treatment remove surface water, volatile hydrocarbon material and unreacted
monomer.
Swisher does not expressly describe the drying as a reduction of moisture content to about 1% to about
2% by weight as claimed by appellants’ “outgassing” step. Swisher, however, does recognize that
humidity can decrease the peel strength of polyimide-metal laminates (col. 3, lines 13-20).
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