Appeal No. 2003-1509
Application 09/853,575
The weakness in the examiner's rejection is the lack of a
teaching of motivation to combine. Although Crossland is silent
about the use of other light sources, we find that one of
ordinary skill in the art had sufficient skill to recognize that
other light sources could be used to backlight the LCD array in
Crossland. However, there needs to be some motivation to
substitute another specific light source. Appeldorn '643 teaches
the use of a planar arrangement of notched optical fibers for
illumination but does not teach that such arrangement would
produce a uniform plane of illumination, except in the background
description of Appeldorn '876 (col. 2, lines 1-6), which the
examiner does not appear to rely on. Thus, it is not readily
apparent that the light source in Appeldorn '643 would be
recognized as a suitable a light source for the LCD in Crossland.
We are not persuaded by the examiner's reasoning that one skilled
in the art would have been motivated to combine Crossland and
Appeldorn '643 because the backing layer 17 of Crossland and the
optical fiber of Appeldorn '643 both utilize the principle of
total internal reflection. The fact that a light source uses
total internal reflection does not say anything about its
suitability for use as a backlight for an LCD. Furthermore,
while Crossland shows etched depressions 81, these are not
clearly analogous to notches in the sidewall of an optical fiber
because the notches direct light to the opposite wall. For these
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