Appeal No. 2001-0716
Application No. 08/813,132
1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
With respect to independent claim 1, the Examiner, as the
basis for the obviousness rejection, proposes to modify the
laminated winding core structure disclosure of House. According
to the Examiner (Answer, page 3), House discloses the claimed
invention “... except for the wound coils comprising a stack of
winding layers.” To address this deficiency, the Examiner turns
to Estrov which discloses a transformer structure made up of a
stack of layers of planar windings. In the Examiner’s analysis
(id.), the skilled artisan would have been motivated and found it
obvious to substitute the planar winding structure of Estrov for
the coil windings of House in order to “... make the transformer
easy to assemble either by hand or machine.”
In response, Appellants assert that the Examiner has failed
to establish a prima facie case of obviousness since the applied
prior art House and Estrov references, even if combined, do not
teach or suggest all of the limitations of independent claim 1.
In particular, Appellants assert (Brief, pages 6-9; Reply Brief,
pages 2 and 3) that, in contrast to the specific language of
appealed claim 1, neither House nor Estrov provide any disclosure
of a winding structure in which all surfaces of the winding
layers are separated by a distance of at least 2g from an air gap
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