Appeal 2005-2100
Application 09/826,038
On page 5 of the Brief, Appellant also argues that Funk fails to use both wet
etching and dry etching in a single set of processing steps, and that the wet etching
takes place after dry etching.
In the paragraph bridging pages 5 and 6 of the Brief, Appellant argues that the
Examiner has failed to establish a realistic motivation to modify Funk so as to arrive at
the claimed limitation of performing wet etching after dry etching. Appellant argues
that the Examiner’s assertion that “it would have been obvious to one with ordinary
skill in the art to perform various processes in various sequences depending on the
specific product requirement” is overly broad and based on generalities. Brief, page 6.
Appellant also states that the specific claimed variable that is to be acquired after
the dry etching and later used to determine processing requirements of the wet etching
is the dimension of the film. Brief, page 7. Appellant states that he is unable to
determine whether the FICD measurement disclosed at column 5, lines 36 through 37
of Funk corresponds to the claimed dimension of the film. Brief, page 7.
We are unpersuaded by Appellant’s arguments for the following reasons.
We begin first with Appellant’s specification which indicates that the crux of
their invention is the ability of reflecting the state of a wafer in the requirements for
processing the wafer through use of the feedforward technique (Specification, p. 2, ll.
10-14). The method includes a first step of acquiring a measurement value pertaining
to a wafer to be subjected to a predetermined processing process. The method also
includes a second step of determining processing requirements for the predetermined
processing process on the basis of the measurement value. The method further
includes a third step of performing the predetermined processing process in accordance
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