Appeal No. 2004-0133
Application No. 09/668,031
claim 11, and the examiner has not established that it would have
been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art to modify the
steps according to Lee’s Figure 12 to achieve the steps recited
in claim 11. Accordingly, we are constrained to reverse the
examiner’s § 103 rejection of claim 11.
One final point remains. Upon return of this application,
the examiner should explore the obviousness of modifying the
method steps in accordance with Lee’s Figure 12 such that the
gold layer is deposited upon the chromium alloy before the heat
sink is soldered to the back surface of chip 70. While we note
appellants’ statement at page 1 of the reply brief that “in
semiconductor processing and packaging, front side processing is
typically quite different from back side processing” (last
paragraph), such distinctions have not been fully developed on
this record.
In conclusion, based on the foregoing, the examiner's § 102
rejection of claims 1, 5 and 7 is affirmed whereas the § 102
rejection of claim 12 is reversed. Also, the examiner’s § 103
rejection of claims 2, 3, 8 and 9 is affirmed while the § 103
rejection of claim 11 is reversed. As a result, the examiner’s
decision rejecting the appealed claims is affirmed-in-part.
8
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007