Appeal No. 2003-0614
Application 09/520,591
Anticipation is established only when a single prior art
reference discloses, expressly or under principles of inherency,
each and every element of a claimed invention. RCA Corp. v.
Applied Digital Data Sys., Inc., 730 F.2d 1440, 1444, 221 USPQ
385, 388 (Fed. Cir. 1984). It is not necessary that the
reference teach what the subject application teaches, but only
that the claim read on something disclosed in the reference,
i.e., that all of the limitations in the claim be found in or
fully met by the reference. Kalman v. Kimberly Clark Corp., 713
F.2d 760, 772, 218 USPQ 781, 789 (Fed. Cir. 1983), cert. denied,
465 U.S. 1026 (1984).
The appellants contend that the anticipation rejection of
claims 1, 3, 16, 19 and 21 is unsound (see pages 9 and 10 in the
main brief and page 4 in the reply brief) because Tigelaar fails
to meet the limitation in independent claim 1 requiring “means
for determining an incoming angle of rotation on a wafer at a
first stage of wafer processing,” and the limitations in
independent claim 16 requiring “a sorting apparatus that
identifies a wafer and places the wafer in a carrier slot” and “a
rotating apparatus that rotates the wafer to an incoming angle of
rotation as the wafer is presented to a first processing stage of
wafer processing.” As indicated above, Tigelaar’s host computer
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