Appeal No. 2005-2247
Application No. 09/976,641
Form our review of the examiner’s statement of the rejection and the relevant
teachings expressly set forth in the prior art references, we conclude the examiner has
found most of individual parts of the claimed invention and attempts to reconstruct the
claimed invention from the known parts. We find the examiner’s rejection to be based
upon improper hindsight reconstruction where many of the combinations of teachings
require a number of further modifications. While these modification may have been
within the level of skill in the relevant art, we find that the examiner has not met the
initial burden of showing a teaching or convincing line of reasoning why it would have
been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to have made
that further modification after the combination such as to form all the various regions of
conductivity in the substrate rather than to additionally use epitaxial layers. Therefore,
we find that the examiner has not established the initial prima facie case of
obviousness of the invention recited in independent claim 11. Therefore, we cannot
sustain the rejection of independent claim 11 and its dependent claims. Similarly, we
cannot sustain the rejection of independent claim 21 and its dependent claims.
Additionally, we do not find that Holmberg remedies the deficiencies in the base
combination. Therefore, we cannot sustain the rejection of dependent claims 13 and
14.
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