Appeal No. 1998-3276
Application No. 08/667,211
environment, should be controlled to less than or equal to about
125 ppm.
From our perspective, the lack of a teaching in the applied
prior art references as to the content of iron contamination
cannot serve as a substitute for the teaching, motivation, or
suggestion needed to establish a prima facie case of
obviousness. In this case, the examiner alleges that either
iron is not present or is present in very small amounts in the
tin alloy dips of the prior art. However, the examiner has not
provided any evidence to refute the appellants’ statement in the
specification that significant amounts of iron contamination are
present in a manufacturing environment or operation. Nor does
the examiner point to any teaching, motivation, or suggestion in
the prior art that would have led one of ordinary skill in the
art to control the iron contamination to the levels as recited
in the appealed claims.
Moreover, as pointed out by the appellants (appeal brief,
pages 5-7, 9-10), none of the relied upon prior art references
identify the same problem with which the appellants are
concerned (i.e., the problem of iron contamination in a
manufacturing
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