Appeal No. 2003-0785
Application 09/457,816
We will not sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims
2-12 and 15. The disclosure in Boutaghou that the carrier can be
made of polyamide or “other preferably suitable materials” is
nothing more than an invitation to artisans to try to find other
suitable materials. This disclosure offers no guidance as to
what these other preferably suitable materials might be. Thus,
the quoted passage from Boutaghou is nothing more than an
invitation to try other materials. Such an invitation to try
other materials does not make any specific material necessarily
obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103. If the only requirement for the
carrier of a disc drive assembly was that it be a dielectric or
that it be flexible, we might agree with the examiner that any
known flexible dielectric would have been obvious to the artisan.
The carrier of a disc drive assembly, however, must also possess
specific aerodynamic properties that permit the transducer head
to accurately read and write data to and from a disc while riding
on an air bearing. The examiner has provided no evidence that an
artisan would have identified a dielectric liquid crystal
substrate as a suitable material for the carrier of a disc drive
assembly. The secondary reference Lambert merely establishes
that LCPs were known in the art as flexible dielectrics. Lambert
was cited by the examiner only because it mentions the LCP
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