Appeal 2007-0053
Application 10/225,829
delivering surface mount electronic components such as memory chips, integrated
circuit chips, resistors, connectors, microprocessors, capacitors, gate arrays, and
the like (Finding of Fact 3). One having ordinary skill in the art at the time of the
invention, possessed with the carrier tape design of Bird and the knowledge of how
to avoid bending stresses at the portion of the tape containing the electronic
components, as taught in Yanagisawa, and facing the problem of improving the
handling characteristics of component-bearing tapes, would have been motivated
to add the low-bending-resistance portions of Yanagisawa to the carrier tape of
Bird to avoid damage to the component parts as the tape is wound about a reel, as
suggested in Yanagisawa.
We reject Appellant’s assertion that Bird “teaches away” from including any
additional apertures in the strip portion of the carrier tape because doing so would
undesirably weaken the tape. Although Bird discusses that removal of material
for the component openings and advancement holes reduces the inherent strength
of the strip portion, Bird teaches that one practicing the invention must use a
polymeric foam having a sufficient tensile strength to compensate for the reduced
strength resulting from the removed material. Rather than discouraging the
removal of material from the strip portion, Bird teaches compensating for the
openings and holes by selecting the appropriate polymeric foam (Finding of Fact
5).
We further reject Appellant’s assertion that one skilled in the art would have
no reasonable expectation of success when modifying the carrier tape of Bird with
the weakened portions of Yanagisawa. To the contrary, we find that there is a high
9
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013