Appeal No. 2003-1208
Application 09/590,805
is used by the appellants, because the appellants’ devices are
transistors (specification, page 7, line 29). Murdock’s diodes
themselves cannot be the appellants’ devices for the additional
reason that diodes have only two leads whereas, although the
appellants’ claim 1 does not specify to what the second leads of
the devices are attached, the claim requires that the devices
have three leads. Additionally, contrary to the examiner’s
argument, the portion of Murdock relied upon by the examiner says
nothing about ionizing radiation. Murdock’s teaching is that
doping the diodes causes them to conduct at a lower voltage than
the magnetoresistive sensor element (col. 10, lines 26-29). The
examiner has not provided evidence or technical reasoning which
shows that Murdock’s doping of the diodes causes the diodes to be
more sensitive than the magnetoresistive sensor element to
ionizing radiation.
The examiner argues that interpreting the appellants’ term
“device” as meaning “transistor” requires reading a limitation
from the specification into the claims (answer, page 11). This
argument is not well taken because a patent specification “acts
as a dictionary when it expressly defines terms used in the
claims or when it defines terms by implication”, Vitronics Corp.
v. Conceptronic, Inc., 90 F.3d 1576, 1582, 39 USPQ2d 1573, 1577
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