Appeal No. 2002-1144
Application No. 09/422,633
obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art within the meaning of
35 U.S.C. § 103 in view of the applied prior art. Accordingly,
we will sustain the examiner's rejection for essentially those
reasons expressed in the Answer.
As in the prior appeal, we find that the claimed positive
working resist composition would have been prima facie obvious to
one of ordinary skill in the art in view of the collective
teachings of Ito and Ito (JPS). While Ito fails to teach the
partial substitution of the functional groups of the polymer with
acid labile groups, there is no dispute that Ito (JPS) discloses
polymer compositions of the type claimed wherein a portion of the
functional groups are substituted with appellants' acid labile
groups, specifically, amounts of substitution which fall directly
within the claimed range of 15-50%. In particular, Ito (JPS)
teaches that when the phenolic functionality of appellants'
polymer is located in the vicinity of appellants' t-butoxy-
carbonyl groups, the thermolysis of the polymer occurs facilely
at 130°C (see Synopsis at page 2971). Since Ito (JPS) discloses
that such "acid-catalyzed thermolysis has been applied to the
design of very sensitive resist materials" (INTRODUCTION, page
2971), we are satisfied that one of ordinary skill in the art
would have had the requisite reasonable expectation that the
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