Appeal No. 2002-1914
Application 09/247,889
Having reviewed and evaluated the applied prior art
references and the APA, we are of the opinion that the examiner’s
position regarding the purported obviousness of claims 1 through
3 on appeal represents a classic case of the examiner using
impermissible hindsight derived from appellant’s own disclosure
in an attempt to reconstruct appellant’s claimed subject matter
from disparate teachings and broad concepts purported to be
present in the applied prior art. In our view, there is no
motivation or suggestion in the applied references to Ellenberger
and Sawada which would have reasonably led one of ordinary skill
in the art to modify the APA in the particular manner urged by
the examiner so as to result in appellant’s claimed subject
matter.
Like appellant (reply brief, pages 2-3), we note that
neither the APA, Ellenberger, or Sawada teach or suggest the step
of applying a photoresist on an air bearing surface “such that
the photoresist is rounded and slopes downward in a curved shape
toward a peripheral region of the air bearing surface,” as
recited in claim 1 on appeal, followed by baking the photoresist
and then by uniform dry etching of the air bearing surface.
Sawada teaches a method of using a photoresist layer (62) and dry
6
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007