Appeal No. 2006-1107
Application No. 09/382,442
uses a dry oxygen atmosphere, appellant argues that there is no
motivation to combine Nakanishi with Lisenker because Lisenker
describes a wet oxygen treatment. In other words, appellant
argues that the Lisenker method is usable in processes that
employ hydrogen, whereas, on the other hand, Nakanishi describes
a process that does not use hydrogen. Appellant also argues that
the deuterium teachings of Lisenker also do not suggest that
deuterium can be used to reduce random single bit data loss in a
FLASH memory cell. Appellant additionally argues that there is
no suggestion that the deuterium treatment of Lisenker would be
effective in an erase operation because deuterium does not have
the same removal properties as hydrogen (brief, pages 9-11).
The examiner responds that the dry oxygen of Nakanishi
unintentionally introduces hydrogen into the process, and “it is
important to replace the ‘unintentional’ hydrogen with
deuterium.” The examiner also notes that Lisenker refers to a
group of MOS based devices of which FLASH memory is a subset.
The examiner also responds that appellant has not pointed out how
the proposed combination differs from the claimed invention in
such a way that a deuterium treatment would be ineffective for an
erase operation (answer, pages 6-7).
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