Appeal No. 1998-0706
Application 08/166,279
in support of these findings. [Footnote omitted.]
To hold otherwise would render the process of
appellate review for substantial evidence on the
record a meaningless exercise. Baltimore & Ohio
R.R. Co. v. Aderdeen & Rockfish R.R. Co., 393 U.S.
87, 91-92 (1968) (rejecting a determination of the
Interstate Commerce Commission with no support in
the record, noting that if the Court were to
conclude otherwise "[t]he requirement for
administrative decisions based on substantial
evidence and reasoned findings -- which alone make
effective judicial review possible -- would become
lost in the haze of so-called expertise").
Accordingly, we cannot accept the Board’s
unsupported assessment of the prior art.
Because the examiner has not provided adequate evidence
of motivation for modifying Allen in the proposed manner, the
rejection of claim 16 and its dependent claims 8 and 12 is
reversed. For the same reasons, we are also reversing the
rejection of independent claims 30-39, which is based on the
same reasoning as the rejection of claims 8, 12, and 16.
F. The merits of the § 103 rejection based on Allen and Bione
The only limitation of claim 17 that is in dispute is the
requirement that the data interconnect means, which
corresponds to Allen's cluster modules, "includ[e] routing
table means containing information indicative of the processor
section nearest the left or the right data transfer means."
Referring to appellants' Figure 6, the routing table register
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