Appeal 2006-3072
Application 10/419,763
since all disclosures of the prior art, including unpreferred embodiments,
must be considered.”).
Thus, we determine that one of ordinary skill in this art routinely
following the teachings of Walton would have formed the interface
alignment layer on the second cell wall from the same or different
polymerizable mixture of polymerizable mesogenic material than that used
for the interface alignment layer on the first cell wall. In doing so, this
person would have arrived at an interface alignment layer of polymerized
aligned mesogenic material on the second cell wall that is different from that
of the first wall with respect to properties thereof, including surface energy
and thus anchoring energy, which affect the pretilt angle of the liquid crystal
layer of the liquid crystal cell. Indeed, we determine that even where each of
the interface alignment layers of the cell walls is formed by polymerizing
separate batches of the same mixture of polymerizable mesogenic materials,
one of ordinary skill in this art would have reasonably expected the resulting
polymeric aligned mesogenic materials to be different to some extent, and
thus the properties thereof to differ to that extent.
Accordingly, one of ordinary skill in this art routinely following the
combined teachings of Walton, Nakamura, and Martinot-Lagarde would
have reasonably arrived at the claimed liquid crystal device encompassed by
claims 1 and 2, including all of the limitations thereof arranged as required
therein, without recourse to Appellants’ Specification. We are not
persuaded otherwise by Appellants’ contentions. One of ordinary skill in
this art would have considered the combined acknowledgments and
teachings of the applied references in light of the knowledge in the liquid
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