The Perkin-Elmer Corporation, a New York Corporation v. Computervision Corporation, a Delaware Corporation

Perkin-Elmer appeals from a judgment upon a jury verdict finding its patents valid but not infringed.

Perkin-Elmer and Computervision sell projection printers, the Micralign and the Cobilt CA-3000, respectively, to the semiconductor industry for use in the manufacture of integrated circuits. A projection printer uses optics to illuminate a circuit design and trace this design on a silicon wafer. A perfect degree of accuracy is demanded. Thus, the central component of a projection printer is its optical system. The optical structure comprising Perkin-El-mer’s Micralign printer is formed by Per-kin-Elmer’s Offer Patent No. 3,748,015 (’015) and Scott Patent No. 3,821,763 (’763).

Both patents possess two physical parts: a large concave spherical mirror and a smaller convex spherical mirror axially spaced behind it. Light that has been shown across the circuit’s design is reflected off the concave mirror to the convex one and then to the image location on the silicon wafer. This procedure results in a near perfect reproduction of the circuit design on the wafer.

Computervision’s CA-3000 functions in a strikingly similar way. The Micralign and the CA-3000 are the only projection…