Appeal No. 2004-2166
Application No. 09/492,557
Rejection over Hurst
The appellant’s claim 34 requires a keeper structure for
applying magnetic fields using exchange coupling to a pair of
edge regions of a sense layer.
Hurst discloses a magnetic memory having a word line (120)
that has a magnetic field keeper (122) on its bottom surface and
side walls and is separated at its upper surface from a bit
region (132) by a thin dielectric material (col. 3, lines 9-12;
col. 7, lines 6-14; figure 16).
The examiner argues that the appellant’s specification
(page 12, lines 5-14) indicates that exchange coupling occurs
between a keeper structure and a sense layer even if there are
intervening seed, reference and dielectric layers (answer,
page 24). What the specification teaches is that when there is
an intervening reference layer there is no exchange coupling
between the keeper structure and the sense layer (page 9,
lines 18-24).
The examiner argues that the keeper structures of the
appellant and Hurst have the same proximity to the sense layer
(answer, page 15). The examiner, however, has not established
that when there is a dielectric layer, such as that of Hurst,
between a keeper structure and a sense layer, there is exchange
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