Appeal No. 2002-0579 Page 8
Application No. 09/324,780
the nonobviousness of the subject matter recited in claim 9. Accordingly, the rejection
of claim 9 as being unpatentable over Oppermann in view of Williams is also sustained.
Claim 13
We turn now to the examiner’s rejection of claim 13, which depends from claim 7
and further recites that the filling material is an epoxy, as being unpatentable over
Oppermann in view of Johnson. We understand the examiner’s position to be that it
would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of appellant’s
invention to use a conductive epoxy material as the “connecting material 95" of
Oppermann, as conductive epoxies were well known in the chip package art at the time
of appellant’s invention for making electrical connections on chip packages as
evidenced by Johnson (column 1, line 45). This position seems eminently reasonable
to us.
Appellant offers two arguments in favor of the patentability of claim 13 over the
combination of Oppermann and Johnson. The first argument, which is that “Johnson
specifically describes an epoxy that is conductive” (brief, page 20), appears to be based
on the premise that claim 13 requires a non-conductive filling material. In that claim 13
contains no such limitation, this argument is not well taken. Appellant’s second
argument is that the use of the conductive epoxy of Johnson as the filling material 37 of
Oppermann (see Figure 1) would render the area between the conductor path and the
contact metallizations conductive and thus “would destroy the functioning of the chip
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