Appeal No. 2001-0743
Application 08/938,346
adhesive, the examiner’s rejection might have had some merit. We
must consider all the teachings of the applied references,
however. Ikeda uses the diamond like carbon layer below the
heating resistive layers to act as a heat sink to help draw heat
away from the print head and into the substrate. Claim 1,
however, recites that the diamond like carbon layer is above the
heating resistive layers. The examiner concedes that the diamond
like carbon layer would retain this heat sink property in its new
location. The examiner has provided no motivation, however, why
the artisan would select a diamond like carbon layer as an
adhesive located in the claimed position when this layer would
draw heat in the opposite direction from which Ikeda teaches that
the heat should be drawn. In fact, the examiner appears to have
failed to even recognize that the proposed combination would have
the effect of mitigating the heat transfer characteristics of the
diamond like carbon layer of Ikeda. Therefore, although there
may be motivation to replace the adhesive of Drake with another
adhesive, the applied prior art suggests that a diamond like
carbon layer used as an adhesive would have heat transfer effects
which are undesirable.
For the reasons discussed above, we do not sustain the
examiner’s rejection of representative, independent claim 1 or of
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