Appeal No. 2006-2317
Application No. 10/334,196
appellants have not formally withdrawn the appeal to claims 35, 37 and 38 and
because no arguments are presented in the brief and reply brief as to these claims,
the rejection of them is summarily affirmed.
As to appellants’ arguments emphasized in the brief and reply brief, the
principal issues between the examiner and the appellants are the characterizations
of the recitations of conductive lines and a conductive layer and the examiner’s
correlations of these features to the teachings and showings in Patti.
The examiner essentially characterizes metal conductors 114 and 115, such
as in Patti’s figure 2 which are apparently analogous to the metal conductors 25, 35
and 45 in figure 1, as conductive lines in claim 1. Additionally, the examiner
characterizes the vertical conductor 50 comprising separate component conductors
51, 52 and 53 in figure 1 of Patti as corresponding to the claimed conductive layer
in claim 1. With this assessment of the teachings and showings in Patti, we fully
agree.
Independent claim 1 recites that the bonding occurs between devices. In
Patti, the devices/wafers are directly bonded to each other as recited. The
additional recitation of bonding by interfacing conductive lines in claim 1 does not
recite that the interfacing is a direct interfacing between the conductive lines by
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