Appeal No. 97-1694
Application 08/351,064
The examiner relies on the following prior art
references:
Lloyd 4,808,855 February 28, 1989
Active Terminators For CMOS Drivers, IBM Technical Disclosure
Bulletin, Vol. 32, No. 4A, September 1989 (hereinafter "IBM").
THE REJECTION
Claims 40, 41, 43, and 55 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103 as being unpatentable over Lloyd and IBM. The examiner
finds that Lloyd shows a plurality of circuits 14 connected to
a bus 10, which is terminated in resistors R1-R4. The
examiner finds that "Fig. 4 of Lloyd shows that the electronic
circuits (14) have a push-pull type of output circuit (42,44)"
(Examiner's Answer, page 4). The examiner concludes that "it
would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at
the time of the invention to replace the linear resistor
terminators in Lloyd with FETs connected as nonlinear diodes
to realize quieting of the bus line as taught by the [IBM]
CMOS Drivers reference" (Examiner's Answer, page 5). The
examiner states (Examiner's Answer, page 5):
The p-channel and n-channel FETs in the [IBM] CMOS
Drivers reference are connected as diodes (or nonlinear
elements) in the same direction and have the same
threshold voltages as the diodes of the instant
invention. Therefore, the FETs connected as nonlinear
- 3 -
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007