Appeal 2007-1552
Application 09/852,123
to the design community or present in the marketplace; and the background
knowledge possessed by a person having ordinary skill in the art, all in order to
determine whether there was an apparent reason to combine the known elements in
the fashion claimed by the patent at issue.” Id. at 1740-41, 82 USPQ2d at 1396.
The Court noted that “[t]o facilitate review, this analysis should be made explicit.”
Id., citing In re Kahn, 441 F.3d 977, 988, 78 USPQ2d 1329, 1336 (Fed. Cir. 2006)
(“[R]ejections on obviousness grounds cannot be sustained by mere conclusory
statements; instead, there must be some articulated reasoning with some rational
underpinning to support the legal conclusion of obviousness”). However, “the
analysis need not seek out precise teachings directed to the specific subject matter
of the challenged claim, for a court can take account of the inferences and creative
steps that a person of ordinary skill in the art would employ.” Id.
ANALYSIS
Rejection of claim 1 under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) as anticipated by Avery
Appellants contend that Avery fails to disclose “a single track resistor (RB)
co-integrated into a semiconductor body, wherein said single track resistor
precedes every control connection (B) of said laterally bipolar transistors (T1-T3)”
because (1) the Examiner’s reliance on the equivalent circuit illustrated FIG. 7 is
improper because “an equivalent circuit is simply a mathematic mechanism for
representing an electrical network” and “not the actual structure of the circuit,”
and (2) “[a]s shown in FIG. 1, the gate electrode 34 runs to only the shorter length
9
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013