Appeal No. 2003-1884
Application No. 09/837,943
principal brief, second paragraph). According to the present
specification,
Those of ordinary skill in the relevant art have
heretofore concluded that noise 12' and 14' is due to
the RF power of the apparatus and the magnetic field
surrounding the cables 134,136 adjacent to the FLOW
terminal 104 and the PRESSURE terminal 106 (Fig. 2).
According to applicant's study, however, neither RF
power nor magnetic influence is the root cause of the
spike problem. Applicant has insulated cables 134,136
with a mass of lead, for example, to prevent inter-
ference by any electrical or magnetic field, but such
measures failed to improve the spike problem [page 11,
first paragraph.
According to the examiner:
As control signals may acquire noise specially
[sic, especially] if routed across several pieces of
active components, as admitted by the applicant
(Specification page 5 line 11-130 [sic, lines 11-13]),
it would have been obvious to one having ordinary skill
in the art at the time the invention was made to reduce
noise by using a simple RC filter connected between the
output of the coolant controller and the input of the
flow controller.
Page 5 of Answer, first paragraph. The examiner further explains
that "[o]nce the noise-affected part of the system is identified,
it would have been a simple matter to reduce noise by using
filtering" (page 7 of Answer, last paragraph).
The flaw in the examiner's reasoning is that although it may
have been a simple matter for one of ordinary skill in the art to
reduce noise by using filtering, the examiner has not established
that one of ordinary skill in the art would have reasonably
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