Appeal No. 2000-1900
Application No. 08/669,937
Further, in our view, regardless of the merits of
Appellant’s argument that, in contrast to their invention,
McConnell performs a second coding of the first coded bits and
the original data, we find no claim language that precludes a
second encoding of original data. As to Appellant’s contention
that McConnell does not disclose the use of a threshold
mathematical distance in determining errors, we refer to our
earlier discussion where we found that a skilled artisan would
appreciate and recognize that “hard” decision decoding, such as
involved in the Hamming decoder of McConnell, would involve a
consideration of a “threshold mathematical distance” as claimed.4
With regard to the Examiner’s alternative obviousness
rejection based on the combination of Hassan and Boyd, we note
that Appellant, with respect to Hassan, has reiterated the
arguments previously made against McConnell. For all of the
reasons discussed supra, we find such arguments to be
unpersuasive.
4 We also observe that, while it is our opinion that the language of
appealed claims 7 and 17 does not require the use of “soft” decision decoding,
the concatenated coding scheme of Boyd discloses the use of “soft” decisions
at the inner decoder (Boyd, page 36:2-2, left column).
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