Appeal No. 2001-2212
Application No. 09/019,409
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).
With respect to claims 1, 12, and 18, separately argued by
Appellants, the Examiner, as the basis for the obviousness
rejection, proposes to modify the memory array fabrication method
disclosure of Esquivel. According to the Examiner (final Office
action, page 3), Esquivel discloses the claimed invention except
for a teaching of “ . . . the implanting of the channel stop dopant
prior to depositing the filed [sic, field] oxide material.” To
address this deficiency, the Examiner turns to Gill which describes
the implanting of a channel stop dopant prior to formation of a
field oxide. In the Examiner’s analysis (id.), the skilled artisan
would have recognized from the teachings of Gill the necessity of
providing a channel stop dopant prior to forming a field oxide
layer and would have been motivated and found it obvious to do so
in Esquivel.
After reviewing the Examiner’s analysis, it is our view that
the Examiner has clearly pointed out the teachings of the Esquivel
and Gill references, has reasonably indicated the perceived
differences between this applied prior art and the claimed
invention, and has provided reasons as to how and why this prior
art would have been modified and/or combined to arrive at the
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