Appeal No. 2000-0732
Application No. 08/741,799
Claim 1 then goes on to recite: “implanting a material
through a top portion of the semiconductor body to form a
barrier layer of said material beneath and separated from the
top surface and at a greater depth than the source/drain
region, for retarding the upward diffusion of said first
dopant.”
The examiner refers to Kato’s embedded layer 11 as the
implanted material. While we agree that layer 11 does appear
to form a barrier layer and is separated from the top surface
of epitaxial layers 13 at a greater depth than the
source/drain regions 27 in Kato, it is not clear to us that
layer 11 in Kato is achieved by “implanting...through a top
portion of the semiconductor body,” as required by the claim.
If the instant claims were directed to a structure, the
process by which that structure was made would be irrelevant.
However, the instant claims are directed to methods having a
particular order of steps. Thus, even though Kato shows
embedded layer 11, it is important to ascertain how that layer
was formed. From Kato’s disclosure, at column 5, line 66-
column 6, line 5, it would appear that layer region 11 is
embedded in the main surface of the substrate 10 prior to the
5–
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Last modified: November 3, 2007