Appeal No. 2003-0123
Application No. 09/383,781
deficiency in Makita and Ohtani identified above. Thus, the rejection of claim 27 is
reversed.
The Examiner rejected claim 4 as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as
obvious over the combination of Tanaka and Takemura; and claims 5 to 13 as
unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as obvious over the combination of Tanaka,
Takemura and Jack.
Tanaka’s invention is directed to a manufacturing process for semiconductor
devices integrated on a single substrate. The process includes the use of laser light
that is selectively applied to the substrate at different illumination energies. The
illumination energy is determined in accordance with the required semiconductor
characteristics. (Col. 4, ll. 1-5). Tanaka discloses the reason why laser light
illumination is performed in two steps is to minimize the degradation in uniformity
of a film surface due to laser light illumination. (Col. 4, ll. 16-18). Tanaka
discloses in the first illumination, the pixel area and the peripheral area are
illuminated at the same energy without using a mask. In the second illumination,
the pixel area and the peripheral circuit area are illuminated at different energies by
using a mask. (Col. 5, ll. 1 to 13). The two-step illumination acts such that
amorphous portions remaining in a film are crystallized in the first illumination and
crystallization is accelerated over the entire film in the second illumination. As a
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