Appeal No. 2005-1680
Application No. 10/012,079
6. Claims 5-9 and 22-23 stand rejected under the
judicially created doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting
as being unpatentable over claims 1-4 of Davis.
Appellants have stipulated on page 5 of their brief that the
rejected claims stand or fall together for purposes of this
appeal.
Based upon the record before us, we find that the examiner
has failed to make out a prima facie case of obviousness with
respect to any of the rejections before us. Accordingly, we
shall reverse each of the rejections on appeal.
With regard to basic claim 1, we agree with the examiner
that Kosaki shows all the features claimed other than “a
passageway disposed around the periphery of the wafer” to provide
for laminar flow of electroplating solution “over the upper
surface of the wafer, toward the center of the wafer, and then
upward” within the cell.
We also agree that Brinket suggests the possibility of
laminar flow of solution across the surface of a semiconductor
substrate in a similar electroplating apparatus for uniform
plating of metals on the substrate.
However, in our opinion, the fatal defect in all of the
examiner's rejections is the reliance upon Suitor as the key
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