Appeal No. 1999-2347
Application 08/892,560
etch step of their claim 21 is not anticipated or rendered
obvious by Woo. Thus, going one way, Appellants claim "the same
patentable invention" as Woo.
In any event, the question under 37 CFR §§ 1.131 and
1.601(n) is whether Woo is anticipated or rendered obvious if
Appellants' claim 21 is considered to be prior art. Neither the
Examiner nor Appellants address this question.
We conclude that Woo's claim 1 would have been obvious over
Appellants' claim 21 taken together with Wolf, Silicon Processing
for the VLSI Era ) Volume 2: Process Integration (Lattice Press
1990), pp. 280-281, 294 (copy attached). Woo's claim 1 is
directed to the right-hand structure of Woo's Fig. 12. We
address what we consider to be arguable differences. One
difference is that Woo's claim 1 recites that the first conductor
is on a "dielectric layer," whereas Appellants' claim 21 recites
a "substrate." It can not be reasonably contested that it was
known to make a substrate from a dielectric layer.
Another difference between Woo's claim 1 and Appellants'
claim 21 is that Woo's claim 1 recites that the first conductor
is "overlying and abutting a metal plug in a first dielectric
layer" whereas Appellants' claim 21 does not call for a metal
plug. We find that it was well known in the semiconductor art to
deposit conductive lines over metal plugs to provide multilayer
interconnects. Also, Wolf, Fig. 4-59(d), shows two metal
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