Appeal No. 2006-0126
Application No. 10/140,619
inclined adhesive was known in the art. Given this problem, those
of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to use their
skill to solve the problem. As stated in In re Nomiya, 509 F.2d
566, 572, 184 USPQ 607, 613 (CCPA 1975):
The significance of evidence that a problem was known in
the prior art is, of course, that knowledge of a problem
provides a reason or motivation for workers in the art to
apply their skill to its solution.
It would have been readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the
art, when faced with the problem of ultraviolet rays applied
perpendicularly to a wafer not penetrating to all portions of an
adhesive because the adhesive is inclined such that the
perpendicularly-applied rays cannot reach the bottom portion of the
inclined adhesive, to align the ultraviolet rays with the adhesive
so that the rays penetrate all of the adhesive. Moreover, even if
the problem were not known in the art, it would have been apparent
to one of ordinary skill in the art that all of the adhesive needs
to be hardened, and that using ultraviolet rays to harden all of
the adhesive requires that the ultraviolet rays penetrate all of
the adhesive. For this reason it would have been prima facie
obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to align the
ultraviolet ray source with the inclined adhesive.
The appellants argue that Kojima ‘919 indicates that
Kojima ‘546 uses slanted ultraviolet rays to prevent bubbling
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