Appeal No. 2003-1365
Application No. 09/376,659
the motivation, suggestion or teaching may come explicitly from
statements in the prior art, the knowledge of one of ordinary
skill in the art, or, in some cases the nature of the problem to
be solved. See In re Dembiczak, 175 F.3d 994, 999, 50 USPQ2d
1614, 1617 (Fed. Cir. 1999).
After reviewing Gardner ‘298 we agree with the Examiner that
the step of “forming first and second protective shoulders” is
disclosed in the references as forming a first nitride protective
shoulder 36 and a second protective shoulder 40 (answer, page 3).
As depicted in Figure 7, the nitride spacer 36 and the oxide
spacer 40 are formed on side 20 of a gate stack which block the
dopants during ion implantation, and certainly, prevent charge
migration during the subsequent process steps. We also observe
that the thin oxide layer 30 (col. 5, lines 15-21) covering the
gate stack and the entire substrate, which is apparently
characterized by Appellants (brief, page 6) as an additional
spacer, is the same oxide layer that is disclosed by Appellant
(specification, page 4, lines 17-20) to cover the gate stacks.
Therefore, this thin oxide layer is neither a part of the two-
layer protective shoulders nor can be considered as an additional
spacer.
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