Appeal No. 2001-2085
Application No. 09/104,409
Hedges, 783 F.2d 1038, 1039, 228 USPQ 685, 686 (Fed. Cir. 1986); In re Piasecki, 745
F.2d 1468, 1472, 223 USPQ 785, 788 (Fed. Cir. 1984); and In re Rinehart, 531 F.2d
1048, 1052, 189 USPQ 143, 147 (CCPA 1976).
It is the examiner’s position that Fiory teaches the monitoring of temperature in a
thermal processing system for forming titanium silicide by depositing a titanium film on a
semiconductor substrate, performing a rapid thermal processing (RTP) on the
substrate, generating a titanium silicide, measuring the resistivity of the silicide, and
determining the temperature of the thermal processing using the resistivity
measurement, referring to column 9, lines 24-37.
Since Fiory uses titanium, rather than cobalt, as claimed, the examiner turns to
Wolf for a teaching that cobalt is a viable alternative to titanium in silicide formation,
referring to page 151. The examiner concludes that it would have been obvious to
modify Fiory’s process, using cobalt instead of titanium, because cobalt has certain
advantages over titanium in silicide formation, such as lower shear forces, no
competing reaction, and less susceptibility to plasma etching, again referring to page
151 of Wolf. This appears, to us, a reasonable, and obvious, modification.
However, the examiner then indicates that it is recognized that Fiory, even as
modified by Wolf, also does not teach measuring a resistance characteristic of the
cobalt film prior to silicide anneal and factoring in this measurement in the step of
determining the temperature of the thermal processing with the resistance of the cobalt
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