Appeal No. 2005-0900
Application No. 10/098,588
because they include the half value width limitations which are
not disclosed by the applied prior art. Appellants note that
neither Yanagisawa nor Shinozuka teaches the claimed half value
width limitation of claims 2 and 8. Appellants also repeat their
argument that the examiner’s assumptions regarding nozzle size
and etch spot size are incorrect and unsupported by the prior art
(reply brief, pages 3-4).
We will not sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims 2,
3, 8 and 9 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 for essentially the reasons
argued by appellants in the briefs. Most importantly, the
examiner has failed to point to any teachings in either
Yanagisawa or Shinozuka which relate to the half value width of
an etching rate distribution peak of the gas injected from the
nozzle, and we have found no such teaching in either reference.
We agree with appellants that independent claims 2 and 8, which
recite the relationship of the wafer table radius and the wafer
radius to the half value width of an etching rate distribution
peak, cannot be rendered obvious by simply finding wafer table
9
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