Appeal No. 1998-2308
Application No. 08/379,868
As pointed out by the appellant (reply brief, page 2), however,
Scobey teaches that the individual sputter devices 30 are physically
separated by baffles 32 such that the chamber 10 is divided “into
different regions or sub-chambers at each sputterer in which
different gas atmospheres and/or gas partial pressures can be
established.” (Emphasis added; Figs. 1 and 4; column 7, lines 55-
60.) Therefore, the individual sputter devices 30 described in
Scobey cannot be said to be spaced apart in “a chamber having
throughout an atmosphere of reactive and inert gases” (emphasis
added) as recited in the appealed claims. Instead, Scobey teaches
that the chamber 10 contains a plurality of different atmospheres.
While Scobey states that the plasma “extends essentially throughout
the vacuum sputtering chamber” (column 9, lines 20-24), this does
not make up for the lack of a teaching or suggestion in the applied
prior art to conduct the process in an apparatus which contains only
one atmosphere throughout the chamber, which contains spaced-apart
sputtering and oxidizing stations.
It is true that, in proceedings before the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office (PTO), claims must be interpreted by giving words
their broadest reasonable meanings in their ordinary usage, taking
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