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United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office Decisions |
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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office Decisions >> NEC Corporation (Patent) [2000] UKIntelP o03800 (11 February 2000) URL: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKIntelP/2000/o03800.html Cite as: [2000] UKIntelP o03800, [2000] UKIntelP o3800 |
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For the whole decision click here: o03800
Summary
The application related to a printed circuit board with a recess for mounting bare chips, and in particular to a method of improving the accuracy of the recess-forming process by using photoetching to form the recess. Following substantive examination, several rounds of amendment and further examination left the claims defining an invention which was, in the examiners view, novel but not inventive.
The obviousness objection was based on prior art which showed the formation of a recess by mechanical cutting and which was described by the applicant as conventional. The hearing officer therefore took this to be common general knowledge. The other relevant document (Adachi) concerned a method of mounting a chip on a printed circuit board so as to improve heat dissipation, but contained a passage which described photoetching as a means of forming a recess. Since Adachi did not address the same problems as the application in suit, the applicant argued that the skilled person would not study this document in depth, and therefore would not encounter the relevant passage in the document. Even so, if he did read the whole document, the skilled person would not make the connection between the disclosure in the relevant passage and the entirely different problem in hand of improving recess-forming accuracy.
The hearing officer rejected these arguments, taking the view that the skilled person would not dismiss the idea of photoetching, as presented in Adachi, as being an integral and inseperable part of the Adachi invention. Instead, he would realise that it could form a more precise method of forming a recess. The application was therefore refused for lacking an inventive step.
