Appeal 2007-0465
Application 10/146,813
Analysis
The Examiner's discussion fails to show where Williams discloses "a
first set of lenses" and "a second set of lens [sic]." The interferometric
system of Williams does not use lenses. The rejection of claim 4 is reversed.
Comment on claim 4
Appellants' Specification is mostly devoted to showing that N photon
entangled light of wavelength λ results in a spatial resolution equivalent to
using a classical light of wavelength λ/N. Appellants admit that it was well
known that in a lithography microscope using classical light, a first lens
makes a Fourier transform of the object, and a second lens transforms it back
to a reduced size image (Specification, page 10 § I.B; Figure 4). Appellants'
invention of claim 4 appears to involve no more that replacing a
conventional light source in a lithography microscope with an N photon
entangled light source. The sole disclosure of the structure is "Figure 5
shows a simple example setup for a semiconductor manufacturing system
using quantum-entangled light" (Specification, page 15), where Figure 5 is
the same as Figure 4 except for the light source. It must be assumed that
everything about Figure 5 is conventional, except the light source, since no
details of the setup are disclosed.
Williams discloses that an entangled photon source can be used to
retrofit an existing lithographic system to obtain better etching results
(col. 2, ll. 42-52) and "[a]ccording to the present system, the classical optical
beam is replaced by a quantum stream of n entangled photons" (col. 6,
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