Appeal No. 1999-2578
Application No. 08/811,363
obviousness, one wonders why the examiner did not apply the rejection, based on
35 U.S.C. § 102 if the examiner truly believes that there are no differences between the
instant claimed subject matter and that disclosed by Korman.
Unfortunately, in the answer, the examiner never comes to grips with the specific
claimed limitations relating to the source regions formed “so as not to extend under the
insulated gate layer” (claim 19) and formed “not under the gate electrode structure” (claim
28). Clearly, in Korman, source regions 120 (Figure 1) do extend under the insulated gate
electrode 131. The source regions in Korman do not appear to be aligned as in the instant
claimed invention and the examiner has pointed to nothing in Korman to suggest that the
artisan would have been led to align the source regions with the gate electrode structure.
The reason the examiner ignores the claim limitations relating to the source region
being “not under the gate electrode structure” may be because, in the examiner’s view,
there is no support for these limitations. We note the statement of the examiner’s rationale
for the rejection, at page 4 of the answer: the claims are rejected “insofar as understood.”
If the claims were not fully understood, the examiner should have considered a rejection
based on the second paragraph of 35 U.S.C. § 112. But if a prior art rejection is to be
applied to the claims, that rejection should address each
and every claim limitation, ignoring no limitation because it is not understood or because
there is allegedly no support for it.
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