Appeal No. 2006-2181
Application No. 10/878,586
The examiner does not cite prior art in the rejection of the
appealed claims.
Appealed claims 1-20 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 112,
first paragraph, description requirement.
Appellants do not set forth an argument that is reasonably
specific to any particular claim on appeal. Accordingly, all
the appealed claims stand or fall together with claims 1 and 9.
We have thoroughly reviewed each of appellants' arguments
for patentability. However, we find that the examiner's
rejection is well-founded and in accordance with current patent
jurisprudence. Accordingly, we will sustain the examiner's
rejection for essentially those reasons expressed in the Answer,
and we add the following primarily for emphasis.
We agree with the examiner that the claim language "the
ratio of a dimension of a contact region to a separation
distance between adjacent contact regions is at least 10:1" does
not find descriptive support in the original specification, nor
does the claim 9 recitation that "the ratio of the dimension of
the contact region to the separation distance between contact
regions is at least 15:1."
It is by now well settled that the description requirement
of 35 U.S.C. § 112, first paragraph, requires that the original
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