Appeal No. 1999-1553
Application No. 08/567,379
the purpose of preventing an input malfunction which may otherwise be caused by a
ground potential fluctuation.” Uramoto discloses a drain capacitor 11b and the examiner
says that it would have been obvious to add a drain capacitor to APA Figure 2 “for the
purpose of suppressing switching noise.” The examiner also contends that it “is
notoriously well known” that supplies often require low pass filtering and so Grob’s Figure
28-9, showing several well known low pass filters, including a supply capacitor C and
impedances L1 and L2, would have led artisans to “add the filter for the purpose of filtering
the supply noise.” See page 4 of the answer.
The examiner’s rejection is, in our view, based on impermissible hindsight gleaned
from appellant’s own disclosure. The examiner is merely picking and choosing various
capacitor connections from various pieces of prior art in order to reconstruct appellant’s
Figure 4 embodiment. However, the instant claims call for the coupling means to couple
noise susceptible circuits to a distributed electrical conductor so that the coupling means
distributes noise to the noise susceptible circuits so that noise is common throughout the
noise susceptible circuits, allowing those circuits to operate with immunity to the noise.
The examiner has pointed to nothing in the applied references which shows the cited
capacitors connected between a noise susceptible circuit and a distributed electrical
conductor carrying noise signals, as claimed.
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