Appeal No. 2001-2089
Application 08/993,368
of complying with the burden of presenting a prima facie case of
obviousness. Note In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d
1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
With respect to independent claim 17, as the basis for
the obviousness rejection, the Examiner proposes to modify the
flash memory structure disclosure of Momodomi which includes a
core region having a stacked gate flash memory cell and a select
gate transistor. According to the Examiner (final Office action,
page 3), Momodomi discloses the claimed invention except for the
formation of the gate oxide of the select gate transistor with
the same layer as the insulating layer of the flash memory cell,
as well as a poly2 layer, as in the flash memory cell, overlying
the gate oxide layer. To address this deficiency, the Examiner
turns to Komori which, as asserted by the Examiner, discloses, as
illustrated in Figure 1, a select transistor Qn having the same
gate oxide and gate layers, identified by numerals 8 and 9,
respectively, as the flash memory cell Qm. In the Examiner’s
analysis (id., at 4), the skilled artisan would have been
motivated and found it obvious to form the gate oxide and gate
layer of the flash cell and the select transistor of the device
of Momodomi with the same layers “. . . to improve the electrical
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