Appeal No. 2005-2284
Application No. 09/748,589
and increases chip size, which is often undesirable in high-density
memories that try to maximize the ratio of number of memory
cells/chip size.” Appellants conclude that the skilled artisan
“would have followed conventional wisdom and not have added ECC
circuitry to the memory arrays disclosed in Zhang and Johnson.”
We disagree. As rightly pointed out by the examiner in
response (answer-page 8), any such alleged disadvantages “were
obviously not enough to prevent Leedy from incorporating it for
their [sic, his] three dimensional high-density memory to achieve
the well known aforementioned benefit of error correction
capabilities.” Thus, since Leedy appears to do what appellants
assert the skilled artisan would not do (i.e., add ECC circuitry to
memory arrays), in order to prevail, appellants would need to point
to additional evidence as to why the artisan would not have taken
the teachings of Leedy and applied them to the memory arrays of
Zhang and/or Johnson.
As for appellants’ “teaching away” argument, a reference may
be said to “teach away” when a person of ordinary skill, upon
[examining] the reference, would be discouraged from following the
path set out in the reference or would be led in a direction
divergent from the path that was taken by the applicant. In re
Gurley, 27 F.3d 551, 553, 31 USPQ2d 1130, 1131 (Fed. Cir. 1994).
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