Court Opinion

ID: 9495275
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:58:24.966007+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:54.816831
License: Public Domain

MICHEL, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The majority believes that we must remand this case for further proceedings because the district court has yet to consider the inventorship question in the light of our proper claim construction. This is true, however, only if the district court’s (purportedly) incorrect claim construction was not harmless error. Because I believe that it was, I would affirm.
The district court originally granted summary judgment that inventorship was correct on the face of the ’410 and ’855 patents. After a seven-day trial in which the jury found the ’855 patent valid, the defendants conceded infringement and appealed. We reversed the trial court’s grant of summary judgment with respect to the ’855 patent and remanded for another trial. Trovan, Ltd. v. Sokymat SA, Nos. 99-1474 and 99-1488, U.S.App. LEXIS 22901, 2000 WL 1285243 (Fed.Cir. Sept. 8, 2000). Specifically, we held there was a genuine issue of material fact “as to whether the direct connection contributed by Gustafson, which was known and used before in circuit boards but apparently not in chips to attach antennae, was a significant inventive contribution, and not one for which it could be said that a reasonable jury would not find that this limitation represented anything more than the application of knowledge already accumulated.” Id. at *15. On remand, the case was tried to the court, which found — again—that Gustafson had not carried his burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that he was a co-inventor of the ’855 patent.
The majority now remands the case yet a second time primarily because it views the concepts of direct bonding and wire support as distinct concepts. Ante at 1307 *1311(“Because of this blurring of the concepts of direct bonding and ■ wire support, the district court’s fact-finding is inconclusive on whether Gustafson contributed to the wire support feature of claims 5 and 9 and seems to have completely read out the wire support feature of requirement out of claims 5 and 9”). My review of the record does not support this conclusion.
As an initial matter, I am not at all convinced that the district court improperly construed the claims. The specification teaches that “[f]or some' applications, it may be possible to. dispense with the support means and depend, entirely upon the wires for support prior to subsequent encapsulation.” ’855 patent, col. 2, lines 44-47. I find the requirement for “sole support” a natural consequence of reading dependent claims 5 and 9 in light of this disclosure. There is nothing in the record before us that suggests the hair-thin lead wires provide partial or additional support; either the wires provide the sole support or they provide no support at all.3 We need not decide this question to resolve the present appeal, however, because the majority’s premise that in the present case the direct connect and wire support are distinct concepts is incorrect. The record is clear, in my view, that the parties used the terms to mean one and the same thing.4
In a January 1991 facsimile to Joseph Masin, Gustafson suggests that the parties “come back to [his] proposal of attaching the chip directly to the ferrite and bond the wires direct to the bumps.”. In his declaration in support of summary judgment, Gustafson describes the ’410 patent as disclosing an invention “wherein the eleetronic circuit and the winding are directly and mechanically connected solely by the ends of the ■ winding wires being directly connected to the leadless metal contact regions of the integrated circuit.” And it is evident that defendants’ expert, Dr. Eugene Rymaszewski, also understood the concept of direct connect and wire support to be the same thing: “The Gus-tafson patent successfully eliminates the ‘lead frame,’ and connects the wire leads or leads directly to the metal contact pads on the integrated circuit chip, so that the wire leads/chip connection is the only mechanical connection between the chip and the winding and the integrated circuit chip is not mechanically fastened to a ferrito core.” (emphasis added).
It is likewise evident from the testimony of Masin, Hadden, and Zirbes that the plaintiffs shared this understanding. When questioned about the incident in Switzerland when Gustafson shook the assembly to demonstrate its firmness even though the wires were the sole support, Masin testified as follows:
Q: Well, is that the first time that you had seen an assembly with a one-millimeter size chip where the wires were connected directly to the gold bumps with nothing else supporting the chip?
A: [I] don’t think anybody could have seen it before, so — ■
Q: But before this no one had created an assembly with the wires directly bonded to the gold bumps of the chip, at least this size chip; is that right?
A: Yes.
*1312The testimony of Zirbes is virtually identical:
Q: Okay. Now I think earlier we talked a little bit about the fact that Mr. Gus-tafson’s demonstration in Switzerland was the first time you had seen a coil winding directly connected-to a chip; is that correct?
A: [That] is correct.
Q: All right. Do you have any reason to believe that Mr. Gustafson wasn’t the first person to reduce, to conceive of and reduce the direct bonding idea to practice?
A: I don’t have any reason — he provided a first sample I saw, I didn’t hear of anybody else doing it out in the industry.
Finally, the testimony of Hadden confirms that he had the same understanding:
Q: [Y]ou can look at as much of the [’855] patent as you need to to answer any of these questions, but I’m calling your attention to column 4 beginning on line 60 which is claim 5 and it talks about an “integrated circuit device as recited in claims 1, 2, 3, or 4 wherein said silicon substrate is supported by said wire leads,” do you see that?
A: Yes.
Q: Okay. Is that referring to a structure where the wires are bonded directly to the chip and the chip is essentially suspended in air as we talked about before?
A: Yes, at some point in the assembly, yes.
(emphasis added).
In light of this testimony and the record as a whole, I view as implausible the conclusion drawn by the majority — that “[i]t is possible to directly bond the wire leads to an integrated circuit chip without those wire leads serving to support the chip in any way” — -just because Hadden testified, for example, that “he considered gluing the silicon substrate to the ferrite core.” Although the majority may be correct in general, the evidence demonstrates that in this case the inventorship dispute is focused on a direct connect method wherein the wires do provide the sole support. Compare Gustafson Aff. at J.A. 2117 (“[I] developed a process and a tool to enable the wire leads of a coil winding to be directly connected ... with-no other mechanical connection between the winding and the chip.”) with Hadden Dep. at J.A. 9389 (responding, when asked if ’855 patent claim 5 referred to direct connect and sole support, that “[t]hat’s exactly what I wrote on the board in the Chicago meeting in 1989”).
With this evidence before it, the district court found that Gustafson had not proven by clear and convincing evidence that he had conceived of the direct connect method. The district court likewise concluded that “Gustafson has not presented clear and convincing evidence that the concept of using thermal compression bonding to provide a means for directly connecting ... [,] as claimed in the ’855 patent, was conceived by him originally.” Overlooking this finding of fact, the majority remands for the district court “to determine wheth- . er Gustafson first conceived of the thermal compression bonding feature of claims 4 and 8,” ante at 1310, without explaining any deficiency in the trial court’s judgment.
We only review judgments, of course, not opinions. See Stratoflex v. Aeroquip Corp., 713 F.2d 1530, 1540 (Fed.Cir.1983). In this case, the district court found that Gustafson had failed to overcome by clear and convincing evidence the presumption of correct inventorship of the ’855 patent. The majority remands this case a second time, however, for further development of a record that I believe is sufficiently complete for us to affirm the judgment. In my view, the practical effect of our deci*1313sion is to give Gustafson a second bite at the apple when (even assuming an erroneous claim construction) the district court plainly believed that the defendants had not carried their burden the first time. Therefore, I respectfully dissent.

. Notably, as depicted in '855 patent Figure 1, the wires are not a part of and are completely separate from support means 18. '855 patent, col. 2, lines 38-44.

. Although appellants submit that wire support "is a more accurate shorthand description of the limitation of claims 5 and 9" than the direct connection terminology, this is merely attorney argument; we have been directed to nothing in the record indicating that such a position was ever taken below, despite ample opportunity to do so.