Appeal 2006-2571
Application 09/759,179
The issues are whether the Examiner erred in concluding it would
have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to arrive at
the claimed stamp as encompassed by claim 1 from the combined teachings
of Whitesides, Biebuyck, and Hawkins, and as encompassed by claim 3 from
the combined teachings of Whitesides, Biebuyck, Hawkins, and Maracas.
The plain language of independent claim 1 specifies a stamp with at
least three recesses with apertures, “a dimension in a first direction in the
printing face” of the aperture of a “first” recess is at least five times the same
dimension of the aperture of another or “third” recess and at least one of
these two recesses “has a triangular shape in a plane perpendicular to the
printing face.” The plain language of dependent claim 3, describes the last
of the three recesses, that is, the “second” recess, which has an aperture that
“is present at a distance smaller than 1 µm from the aperture of the first
recess.” Thus, the apertures and recesses in the embodiments encompassed
by these claims are not uniform. An embodiment falling within these claims
is illustrated in Specification FIG. 1. This figure shows a vertical cross-
section of stamp 10 having triangular recesses 11,12,13 with respective
apertures 15,16,17, wherein recesses 11,12 are of the same dimensions and
recess 13 is substantially larger (Specification 10:23-31).
We find Whitesides would have disclosed to one of ordinary skill in
this art an embodiment of a method of etching articles via microcontact
printing resulting in a pattern with micron and submicron features
(Whitesides cols. 1-5). In this method, inter alia, a resist coated article is
contacted with a stamp to transfer to the article a self-assembled monolayer
of a molecular species in a pattern from which the molecular species spreads
7
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013