Appeal No. 2004-0634
Application No. 09/948,271
Claim 9 is illustrative of the claims on appeal:
9. An integrated circuit comprising:
a substrate;
a cascode circuit formed over said substrate; and
a triple well formed in said substrate under said cascode circuit.
The appealed claims, as represented by the above claim, are directed to an integrated
circuit having a cascode circuit and a triple well formed in the substrate under the cascode circuit.
The references relied on by the examiner are:
Momohara 6,055,655 April 25, 2000
Williamson 6,369,427 April 9, 2002
Claims 9 through 15 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over
the combined teachings of Williamson and Momohara. Appellants state in the appeal brief that
claims 10-15 "may be grouped with claim 9 for convenience on appeal." (brief, page 3.)
Accordingly, we decide this appeal based entirely on appealed claim 9. See 37 CFR § 1.192(c)
(7)(2002).
Rather than reiterate the respective position advanced by the examiner and the appellants,
we refer to the examiner's answer and appellants’ brief for a complete exposition thereof.
The first step in reviewing the application of the prior art to the appealed claims is to
interpret the language of the claim by giving the claim terms their broadest reasonable
interpretation consistent with the written description provided in appellants’ specification as it
would be interpreted by one of ordinary skill in the art. See, e.g., In re Hyatt, 211 F.3d 1367,
54 USPQ2d 1664, 1667 (Fed. Cir. 2000); In re Morris, 127 F.3d 1048, 1054-55, 44 USPQ2d
1023, 1027 (Fed. Cir. 1997); In re Zletz, 893 F.2d 319, 321-22, 13 USPQ2d 1320, 1322 (Fed.
Cir. 1989). We here consider the claim term “triple well,” which is used in the specification to
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