Appeal No. 1998-0097
Application No. 08/513,036
The fact that the arsine gas partial pressure used by
Heyen in his method is far outside the here claimed range
militates against the Examiner's conclusion that optimization
of this
parameter in Heyen's method would result in the Appellants'
claimed values. In re Sebek, 465 F.2d 904, 906-07, 175 USPQ
93, 95 (CCPA 1972). Furthermore, although the Examiner in his
rebuttal to the Appellants' arguments states that the Heyen
reference "is not limited to the partial pressure shown in
figure 4" (answer, page 8), he has proferred no specific
evidence of any specific prior art partial pressures of any
value much less values which are at least close to (and thus
presumably would have suggested) those claimed by the
Appellants.
In light of the foregoing, we also cannot sustain the
Examiner's § 103 rejection of claim 5 as being unpatentable
over Heyen.
As for the § 103 rejection based on Van NT Blik in view of
Menigaux and Heyen, we consider it questionable at best
whether the disparate teachings of the references would have
been combined in the manner proposed by the Examiner by an
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