Appeal No.1999-1940
Application No. 08/654,760
that the examiner is indulging in speculation when she makes the
statement (answer at page 4), that: “[f]loating gate FG is ‘self
aligned . . . so as to not extend beyond the edges of said well,’
because FG does not extend beyond the edges of the well.” The
examiner has not pointed to any specific recitation in the text
of Mori to buttress this position. Therefore, we do not sustain
the anticipation rejection of claim 24 by Mori.
With respect to the rejection of claims 1, and 3 and 4 under
§§ 102/103, we note that this rejection suffers from the same
deficiency as noted above, that is, the configuration resulting
from the process of achieving a “self aligned” structure which
has no horizontal components to the floating gate is not shown by
Mori and the examiner has not provided any evidence to support
the contention that it would have been obvious to supply Mori
with a floating gate having the recited structure. Therefore, we
do not sustain the rejections of claims 1, and 3 to 4 over Mori.
4 We note that in claim 2, line 16, the phrase “first layer of
insulating material” lacks proper antecedent basis because line 14 of claim 2
eliminates the definition of a first layer. In any future prosecution of this
application, we recommend that the examiner and the appellant to assure that
proper antecedence is provided for the recited “first layer”.
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