Appeal No. 1997-1644 Page 13
Application No. 08/367,681
... Boomer merely preserves the option of
programming the driver during use. Certainly, they
could be programmed any time prior to that if the
additional feature of flexibility was not needed.
Moreover, appellant is touting the commonplace
method of programmability. If the flexibility of
programming provided by Boomer was superfluous to
the application, then it would have been obvious to
Boomer to program the circuit when it was most
convenient with the motivation of yielding to the
particular requirements of the application.
(Examiner’s Answer at 4.)
We agree with the examiner.
Claim 11 specifies in pertinent part that the “means for
controlling the slew rates of said output drivers includes
control circuitry containing resistors programmable by
interconnect definition during device fabrication.”
The appellant again errs in determining the content of
the prior art. In particular, his characterization of Boomer
as “a circuit which must be programmed for each use,” (Reply
Br. at 6), is specious. Workers in the art would have known
that the reference’s programmable resistors, R and R , wereP N
initially programmed to achieve an acceptable slew rate. Once
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