Appeal No. 1999-0801
Application 08/552,245
99 F.3d 1568, 1572-73, 40 USPQ2d 1619, 1622 (Fed. Cir. 1996), and cases cited therein (a claim
term will be given its ordinary meaning unless appellant discloses a novel use of that term). The plain
language of appealed claims 6 and 7 specifies that the “gas baffle . . . comprises a disk having unbroken,
upper and lower surfaces.” We find no definition of the term “unbroken” in the written description in
appellants’ specification and thus give the term its ordinary dictionary meaning of “1. Not broken or
tampered with; intact. 2. Not violated or breached. 3. Uninterrupted; continuous.” The American
Heritage Dictionary Second College Edition 1315 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982).
Thus, claims 6 and 7 clearly require a gas baffle comprising at least a disk that has intact, continuous
surfaces that are not breached or interrupted in any manner.3 We further find that both claims 6 and 7
plainly require “admitting gas” for sputtering “through an inlet centrally located above said gas baffle.”
3 We observe in the written description in appellants’ specification with respect to Figure 3, that “the
gas baffle” comprises “plates 31 and 32;” that “it is seen that the gas baffle . . . [has] no rough
protuberances (such as screw heads 21 in [prior art] Fig. 2)” because “plate 32” is attached to plate 31
“flat-headed screws 33 [are used] in place of the round-headed screws 21,” wherein “flat-headed
screws were counter sunk into the lower surface of 32 so that said surface remained uniformly planar;”
and that a screw threaded opening in plate 32 for “threaded rod 39” permits “pulling lower plate 31 into
close contact with upper plate 32” (page 7). It is apparent from this disclosure that appellants intend to
differentiate the gas baffle as shown in Figure 3 from the gas baffle of the acknowledged prior art
apparatus shown in Figure 2 (id.). However, we readily observe in Figure 3 that the shafts of screws
33 extend through the surface of plate 32, which is the upper plate of the described baffle, to connect
the baffle to shield 2, and that the upper surface of plate 32 is not conterminous with the lower surface
of plate 31, which is the lower plate of the described baffle. Thus, the upper surface of the gas baffle
provided by plate 32 is not “unbroken,” as we have interpreted this term above, with respect to either
the protuberances provided by screws 33 or the abrupt edges thereof vis-à-vis plate 33 which will
cause eddies, that is, interrupted dispersion of the sputtering gas. Whether this disclosure constitutes a
written description of an embodiment that falls within the appealed claims as we have interpreted the
language “gas baffle . . . comprises a disk having unbroken, upper and lower surfaces,” is a different
issue than the interpretation to be made of such language in light of the written description of appellants’
specification as it would be interpreted by one of ordinary skill in this art. In this respect, it is well
settled that during prosecution, no limitation included in the specification, by working example or
otherwise, will be read into a claim unless the claim provides a basis for such a limitation. See Zletz,
supra; In re Priest, 582 F.2d 33, 37, 199 USPQ 11, 15 (CCPA 1978), quoting In re Prater, 415
F.2d 1393, 1405, 162 USPQ 541, 551 (CCPA 1969) (“We have consistently held that no ‘applicant
should have limitations of the specification read into a claim where no express statement of the limitation
is included in the claim.’”).
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