Appeal No. 2005-0779
Application No. 09/802,084
The Section 102 rejection is further deficient in that
Burnham’s method does not include the appealed claim 1 step of
“subsequently annealing the structure” as correctly argued by the
appellants. Again, the answer contains no reasonably specific
discussion or even acknowledgment of this argued claim feature.
Although the examiner once again does not say so, he may regard
patentee’s laser beam irradiating step as performing an annealing
function. However, such a step of simultaneously irradiating and
annealing would not satisfy the requirements of the independent
claim on appeal. This is because claim 1 requires these steps to
be practiced sequentially, that is, “irradiating the structure
. . . and subsequently annealing the structure” (emphasis added).
For the above stated reasons, we cannot sustain the
examiner’s Section 102 rejection of appealed independent claim
1 or concomitantly of appealed dependent claims 4-9 as being
anticipated by Burnham. Because the other applied references
have not been relied upon by the examiner to supply these
deficiencies of Burnham, we also cannot sustain the Section
103 rejections of claims 2, 3 and 16 as being unpatentable over
Burnham in view of Thompson or of claims 10-15 as being
unpatentable over Burnham in view of Poole and Feldman.
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