Appeal No. 96-3850
Application No. 08/253,480
that the trend in microcomputers is to place more elements on
the same semiconductor chip. Accordingly, he concludes that
it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art
at the time of the invention to place a memory on the same
semiconductor chip as the microprocessor.
Although we agree that merely placing a memory on the
same semiconductor chip as the microprocessor would have been
obvious in light of the trends in microcomputers, the examiner
has not indicated why it would have been obvious to an artisan
to place in such a read/writable memory, the interrupt vector
table. Furthermore, none of the references teach or suggest
setting the diagnostic interrupt vector table in a
read/writable memory that not only is formed in the same
semiconductor chip as the microprocessor but also is
ordinarily inoperative during a POST.
The examiner states (Answer, page 3), "As per Appellant's
point that the read/writable memory is not normally available
to the POST. The Examiner views the exclusive used [sic] of a
memory, which was off-chip and has now been added on-chip for
the same purpose, as neither novel or unobvious." The test
for obviousness, however, is not how the examiner "views" the
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