Appeal No. 1999-1939
Application No. 08/862,449
We have carefully considered the entire record before us,
and we will reverse all of the rejections of record.
All of the claims on appeal require that the pass gate
transistors have either “a gate material selected to provide a
substantially near mid-gap work function or greater” (claims
1 through 4, 8, 9, 11 and 15) or “n-channel devices having P+
doped polysilicon gate regions” (claims 17, 19, 21, 23, 25,
27, 29 and 31). Inasmuch as the examiner’s sole statement
(answer, page 3) that “Tanigawa teaches thin film memory cell
transistors combined with peripheral transistors” fails to
identify which of the transistors in Tanigawa are pass gate
transistors, we would have to resort to speculation as to
which transistors in Tanigawa are subject to modification
based upon the teachings of Lee, Klein, Misawa, Azuma, Shino,
Masui or Noguchi. In keeping with In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d
1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992), the
examiner, and not the Board, bears the initial burden of
establishing the prima facie unpatentability of the claimed
invention. Thus, we agree with appellant’s argument (reply
brief, page 2) that the applied references neither teach nor
would have suggested the specifically claimed pass gate
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