DETAILED ACTIONNotice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b), as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor, or for pre-AIA the applicant regards as the invention.
Claims 1, 2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19 and 20 each disclose steps of “forming or providing” (e.g. claim 1, lines 2-3, 5-6 and 8; emphasis added). This language is indefinite, because the claims are directed to methods of manufacture, and it is not at all clear whether any manufacturing (i.e. forming) is being performed. A reasonable interpretation of these limitations would be to select “providing” for each and every one, in which case there is literally not a single manufacturing step for any of the structures associated with these phrases. Further, in just claim 1 alone there is disclosed seven alternative statements of “forming or providing”, which results in 128 different possible methods recited in a single claim. When compounded with the numerous other instances of “forming or providing” throughout the claims, there are hundreds or even thousands of methods being recited. Simply put, if the reader does not know what the preferred method is and multiple distinct interpretations of the claim are reasonable and it is not clear which is intended, then the claim is indefinite. The Applicant is strongly encouraged to decide what the actual method of the claims is intended to be, and to disclose that method.
NOTE: The Applicant is strongly cautioned that there is nothing in the entire original disclosure which provides any details whatsoever regarding what step(s) is/are taken in any of the purported “forming” steps. In fact, the supposed method of the claims is not even mentioned anywhere in any of the “Detailed Description” section of the specification. This vague method is only mentioned in the “Summary” section of the specification and therein is still only vaguely referred to as “forming or providing” with absolutely no details about how any of the structures would actually be formed. The word “forming” or any related methodology (except for providing and an oblique reference to etching) occurs zero times in the entire “Detailed Description”. Similarly, the “pair of strips” is nowhere in the “Detailed Description”. All of this causes the Examiner to question whether the method was actually performed as claimed, because it is not recited with any detail, much less as the inventive concept in the specification.
Claims 2-10 and 12-20 are also rejected as indefinite, so rendered by virtue of their dependency upon the indefinite subject matter of claims 1 and 11.
Claims 3-5 and 13-15 are each further rejected as indefinite, because the claims disclose “The method of claim 1 (or 11) wherein forming the pair of strips…” (emphasis added). This language is indefinite because, as noted above, a reasonable interpretation of claims 1 and 11 is that there may be no forming steps at all, and instead each of the structures may have been simply provided. As such, the limitations of claims 3-5 and 13-15 thus lack antecedent basis. These claims should be changed to “providing” based upon the lack of support for any real forming steps as noted above. Nonetheless, as currently presented, interpretation of the claims as requiring either forming or providing is reasonable, and the prior art is not required to demonstrate “forming” to anticipate the steps of claims 1-2, 9-12 and 19-20.
Claims 5 and 15 are each further rejected as indefinite, because the claims both disclose “forming the pair of strips includes forming the strips so that they have a width of between 0.5L and 1.5L and a thickness of between 0.001L and 0.005L” (emphasis added). First it is noted that these two claims and almost all of the other dependent claims are written with this circular logic format. The recitation that “forming the pair of strips includes forming the strips so that…” is awkward and difficult to interpret. The claims could simply state “forming the pair of strips so that…” and would carry the same apparent meaning and wouldn’t disclosed in such a redundant manner. Further, the claimed “measurements” are meaningless in the art. There is no distance measurement of “L”, except for “leagues” or “light years” which are both immensely too large to be applicable in the manufacture of piezoelectric elements. Further, the specification alternates between “L” and “λ”, which is also not a unit of distance, though it may be the wavelength of the device vibrations(?). Even assuming, ad arguendo, that the “L” of the claim is intended to refer to the “Length” of the strips (this is not the case and finds no support in the original disclosure), the limitation would still be indefinite as there is no referential length measurement in the claims. The Applicant is strongly encouraged to cancel these indefinite claims as there is no support for any reasonable interpretations of the claims in the original disclosure.
NOTE: All of the examined claims (i.e. claims 1-20) have been interpreted and examined as best understood according to the 112(b) rejections, above.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1-4, 6-14 and 16-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Abbott et al. (US 12,009,795 B2), in view of Honal (CN 112005493 A; translation provided by Examiner concurrently).
Regarding claims 1 and 11 (additional claim 11 limitations are italicized), Abbott discloses a method of manufacturing a radio frequency module (Title) comprising: forming or providing a package substrate (16) (figs. 1 and 5; col. 8, lines 42-52); forming or providing an acoustic wave device/resonator including forming or providing a multilayer piezoelectric substrate (10, 14, 12/12’, 22, 24, 26) including forming or providing a piezoelectric layer (10) and forming or providing a support substrate (14) below the piezoelectric layer (figs. 5 and 7B-7D; col. 8, lines 42-52; col. 13, lines 51-59), and forming or providing an interdigital transducer electrode (12/12’) including forming or providing a first layer (24) disposed over the piezoelectric layer, forming or providing a second layer (26) disposed over the first layer, the second layer being of a less dense material (first layer is molybdenum, second layer is aluminum, same materials as disclosed by Applicant, naturally have same material properties, i.e. densities as those disclosed in instant Application) than the first layer (fig. 5; col. 9, lines 25-33; cols. 13-14, lines 65-67 and 1-6), forming or providing a third layer (col. 12, lines 56-57: “multi-layer IDT electrode 12’ can include three or more layers”) disposed over the second layer formed as a pair of strips (third and top layer of each of 12) extending over one or more fingers of the interdigital transducer electrode and having a density *configured to suppress a transverse mode of the acoustic wave device/resonator (col. 12, lines 43-57); and attaching additional circuitry (177) and the acoustic wave resonator to the package substrate (figs. 7A-7E and 9; col. 13, lines 51-59; col. 15, lines 1-9). Abbott, however, does not explicitly disclose etching the third layer to form the pair of strips.
*NOTE: regarding the intended functionality of the third layer, claimed as: “having a density configured to suppress a transverse mode of the acoustic wave device/resonator”, this purported limitation is not understood to limit the claimed method in any discernable manner. Moreover, the instant disclosed material(s) of the third layer is/are aluminum or tungsten, and Abbott explicitly discloses that the additional layer(s) can be either or both of aluminum or tungsten. As such, due to the fact that the prior art discloses the same materials as the claimed third layer, the product of Abbott is held to possess the same materials properties as that of the instant third layer and thus would be capable of performing the same intended function as that of the instant claims.
Honal teaches that it is well known to perform a similar method of manufacturing an acoustic wave device (pg. 2, lines 1-5) comprising: forming or providing a multilayer piezoelectric substrate (310, 430, 431, 440, 450, 421, 441) including forming or providing a piezoelectric layer (310) (Abstract; fig. 4; pg. 7, par. 5, lines 1-4); and forming or providing an interdigital transducer electrode (121, corresponding to 412 and 421, including: 430, 431) including forming or providing a first layer (430) disposed over the piezoelectric layer, forming or providing a second layer (431) disposed over the first layer (fig. 4; pg. 7, par. 2, lines 1-4; pg. 7, par. 5, lines 5-7; pp. 7-8, par. 6, all), forming or providing a third layer (440 or 450 or 441) disposed over the second layer, and etching the third layer to form a pair of strips (fig. 4: two shown) extending over one or more fingers of the interdigital transducer electrode (figs. 3-4; pp. 7-8, par. 6, lines 4-11; pg. 4, par. 2, lines 3-11).
Before the effective filing date of the invention, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to have modified the current invention of Abbott to incorporate the etching of the third layer of Honal. POSITA would have realized that etching is old and well-known in the art and can be easily and readily employed in selective removal of electrode or metal layers to achieve the desired precise and accurately patterned layers and to control which layer are etched and how much they are etched based upon known etching rates of different materials. Moreover, there is no indication in the instant disclosure that any special etching step or technique was devised or that any surprising results were derived from simply using the old method of Abbott with the well-known etching of the third layer of Honal. This combination would have been easily performed with knowledge of the commonly understood advantages and with reasonable expectations of success.
Regarding claim 2/12, Abbott in view of Honal teaches the method of claim 1/11 as detailed above, and Abbott further discloses that forming or providing the multilayer piezoelectric substrate includes forming or providing a functional layer between the support substrate and the piezoelectric layer (col. 11, lines 27-31).
Regarding claim 3/13, Abbott in view of Honal teaches the method of claim 1/11 as detailed above, and Abbott further discloses that forming the pair of strips includes forming the strips so that they are disposed over edge regions of the fingers of the interdigital transducer electrode (fig. 5).
Regarding claim 4/14, Abbott in view of Honal teaches the method of claim 1/11 as detailed above, and Honal further teaches that it is well known that forming the pair of strips includes forming the strips so that they are offset from a distal edge of the fingers and toward a central region of the fingers (fig. 4).
Regarding claim 6/16, Abbott in view of Honal teaches the method of claim 1/11 as detailed above, and Abbott further discloses that the first layer is made of molybdenum and the second layer is made of aluminum (col. 9, lines 25-33; col. 12, lines 48-57).
Regarding claim 7/17, Abbott in view of Honal teaches the method of claim 1/11 as detailed above, and Abbott further discloses the third layer is made of molybdenum, aluminum or tungsten (col. 12, lines 48-57).
Regarding claim 8/18, Abbott in view of Honal teaches the method of claim 1/11 as detailed above, and Abbott further discloses that the interdigital transducer electrode includes a fourth layer (“three or more layers”) disposed between the second layer and the third layer col. 12, lines 48-57). Honal further teaches that it is well known that the interdigital transducer electrode includes a fourth layer (440) disposed between the second layer and the third layer (450 or 441) (fig. 4).
Regarding claim 9-19, Abbott in view of Honal teaches the method of claim 1/11 as detailed above, and Honal further teaches that it is well known that forming or providing the second layer includes tapering side edges of the second layer of the interdigital transducer electrode (fig. 4).
Regarding claim 10/20, Abbott in view of Honal teaches the method of claim 1/11 as detailed above, and Abbott further discloses forming or providing a passivation layer (22) disposed over the interdigital transducer electrode (fig. 3; col. 11, lines 61-66).
Claims 5 and 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Abbott in view of Honal, further in view of Lu et al. (CN-111277241-A).
Regarding claims 5/15, Abbott in view of Honal teaches all of the elements of the current invention as detailed above with respect to claims 1/11. The modified Abbott, however, does not appear to teach forming the strips so that they have a width of between 0.5L (or 0.5λ?) and 1.5L (or 1.5λ?) and a thickness of between 0.001L (or 0.001λ?)and 0.005L (or 0.005λ?).
Lu teaches that it is well known to perform a similar method (Title; Abstract; pp. 3-4, lines 20-37 and 1-2), comprising forming the strips (5) so that they have a width of between 0.5L (or 0.5λ?) and 1.5L (or 1.5λ?) and a thickness of between 0.001L (or 0.001λ?)and 0.005L (or 0.005λ?) (fig. 1; pg. 3, lines 5-14; pg. 5, lines 18-21; pg. 6, lines 16-17).
Before the effective filing date of the invention, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to have further modified the invention of Abbott to incorporate the preferred line width and thickness of the strips of Lu. Initially it is noted that there is no indication of how the intended dimensions of the product would affect the method of manufacture in any way. Further, there is no apparent criticality to this limitation, especially as it pertains to the actually claimed method of manufacture. POSITA would have realized that any desired dimensions of the strips can be easily and readily formed in the old and well-known methods to achieve the desired transducer capabilities and product footprint. Moreover, there is no indication in the instant disclosure that any special thickness or width was devised or that any surprising results were derived from simply using the old method of Abbott with the well-known preferred dimensions of the product of Lu. This combination would have been easily performed with knowledge of the commonly understood advantages and with reasonable expectations of success.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. Please refer to the concurrently mailed PTO-892, as all of those cited references are considered to be pertinent to the claimed invention. For example, Miura et al. (US 2019/0207583 A1) is held to be of particular relevance to the claimed invention.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Jeffrey T Carley whose telephone number is (571)270-5609. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm.
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/JEFFREY T CARLEY/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3729