Appeal No. 2002-2087
Application No. 09/733,836
the STI to contact the source and drain diffusion regions (and thus
these contact structures do not extend through the entire STI).
Support for this recitation in claim 9 is clearly found in the
specification (page 6, ll. 1-3) and Figure 1.
For the foregoing reasons and those stated in the Brief and
Reply Brief, we determine that the examiner has failed to meet the
initial burden of establishing failure to meet the requirements of
35 U.S.C. § 112, first and second paragraphs. Accordingly, we
reverse the rejections of claims 9-16 under ¶1 and ¶2 of 35 U.S.C.
§ 112.
B. The Rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a)
The examiner finds that Lin teaches, in Figure 6 and related
text, an ESD structure comprising a p type semiconductor substrate
20 [sic, 10; see Lin, col. 3, l. 30], n+ source and drain diffusion
regions 43, and respective source and drain n-wells 21, under each
diffusion region, and STI 30 formed over and into the substrate “to
separate the source and drain diffusion regions and a portion of
the source and drain wells” (Answer, page 5). The examiner admits
that Lin does not explicitly state that STI regions separate the
source and drain diffusion regions and a portion of the source and
drain wells, but the examiner states that “it is well known in the
art that STI regions separate active regions of one device from
6
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