Appeal No. 1996-3095
Application 08/346,311
appellants’ specification and claims, the applied patent, and the respective viewpoints of appellants and
the examiner. As a consequence of our review, we are in general agreement with appellants (Brief,
pages 4 to 6; Reply Brief, pages 1 to 4) that the claims on appeal would not have been obvious to one
of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made in light of the collective teachings of
Osman. We find that the examiner has failed to make out a prima facie case of obviousness. For the
reasons which follow, we will not sustain the decision of the examiner rejecting claims 1 to 4 under 35
U.S.C. § 103.
Appellants argue (Brief, page 4; Reply Brief, pages 3 to 4) that Osman neither taught nor would
have suggested parity bits being stored in a separate row of memory cells (i.e., one which does not
include data bits). We agree with appellants that in Osman "there are no parity bits, vertical or
horizontal, that are stored in a separate row of memory cells, i.e., a row that does not also include data
bits" (Reply Brief, page 3). Representative claim 1 on appeal calls for: . . . .
a protected memory space comprising a subset of the rows and the columns of memory
storage cells wherein data and horizontal parity bits for the data are stored, and a vertical parity
database wherein vertical parity bits are stored;
the data stored in the protected memory space being arranged in rows of
horizontally contiguous bytes;
the vertical parity bits being arranged in a row separate from the rows of horiztonally
contiguous bytes of data; . . ..
We find that claim 1 on appeal requires that the vertical parity bits are in a protected memory space
which is required to be separate from the data bits stored in the DRAM. We also find that Osman
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