Appeal No. 1999-0011
Application No. 08/428,812
Bossen shows all the claimed elements except that it does not
explicitly show m one bit Hamming code decoders. The Examiner
argues that Bossen, however, suggests five EX-OR gates (17),
each is used for each i-th bit of a column of the array. The
Examiner concludes that "[i]t would have been obvious to one
skilled in the art at the time the invention was made to use
the X-OR gates as decoders." Appellants argue, Brief at page
9, that "[a]lthough Bossen does disclose using a decoder
having EX-OR gates, Bossen neither teaches nor suggests the
use of m parallel one bit Hamming code decoders. . . . A
Hamming decoder is not merely a collection of EX-OR gates. A
Hamming decoder also does not generate copies of each data bit
from the data bits and check bits and compare these copies [as
those in Bossen]. . . . In addition, a Hamming decoder
combines specific combinations of inputs to decode a data
word. No particular combination of inputs is implied from the
use of EX-OR gates alone".
We agree with Appellants that the use of EX-OR gates by
Bossen does not necessarily imply a Hamming decoder. However,
Bossen does show parallel decoder means for error detecting
and correcting of an n x m bit data word. See Figures 6 and
8
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