Appeal No. 2005-0453 Page 4
Application No. 09/893,866
represent the issues on appeal. For each of the other rejections, we will select one of the rejected
claims to represent the issues on appeal.
Substantially for the reasons advanced by the Examiner in the Answer, we affirm. We
add the following primarily for emphasis.
OPINION
Anticipation by Zhang
The Examiner rejects claims 1-3, 12, and 14 under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) as being
anticipated by Zhang. Zhang describes employing a crystallization catalyst to promote
crystallization in a silicon film. Similarly to Appellant, Zhang intends to use the crystallized
region of the silicon which contains the catalyst as a crystalline silicon TFT of an active matrix
(AM) circuit of an LCD (Zhang, abstract; col. 1, ll. 8-22). The catalyst is an “impurity” within
the meaning of Appellant’s claims (Zhang, col. 1, ll. 46-53). Zhang describes several methods
for introducing the impurity into the silicon film including a sputtering method in which the
impurity is added to the sputtering target (Zhang, col. 3, ll. 62-65).
Appellant argues that the disclosure of sputtering in Zhang neither teaches all the
elements of the invention of claims 1 and 12 nor enables one of ordinary skill in the art to
perform the process of the claims (Brief, pp. 4-6). The focus of these arguments is on the
limitations directed to the concentration of the impurity.
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