Appeal 2006-3434
Application 10/687,907
Appellants contend that Miller does not teach the invention as set
forth in claims 1, 2, 7, 8, 10 through 12 and 17 through 19.2 Particularly,
Appellants contend that Miller does not fairly teach or suggest writing illegal
values to substantially all the table entries in a fully associative table. (Br. 6;
Reply Br. 2-4). For these same reasons, Appellants conclude that claims 3,
6, 9, 13, and 16 are not unpatentable over Miller in combination with Geva
or Hale. Appellants further contend that the Examiner has failed to establish
sufficient motivation to combine Miller with Geva or Hale.
The Examiner, in contrast, contends that Miller teaches the claimed
writing of illegal values in table entries as valid status bits that are initialized
to an invalid state (Answer 11). Further, the Examiner contends that it
would have been obvious to incorporate Geva’s teaching of a most recent
advanced load instruction for a check instruction or Hale’s teaching of a
specific machine for executing writing instructions in Miller’s architecture
for implementing invalid data (Answer 10).
We affirm.
ISSUES
The pivotal issues in the appeal before us are as follows:
(1) Under 35 U.S.C. § 102 (b), does Miller anticipate the claimed invention
when Miller discloses initializing all valid status bits to an invalid state?
(2) Under 35 U.S.C. § 103 (a), would one of ordinary skill in the art at the
time of the present invention, have found that sufficient motivation to
2 This decision considers only those arguments that Appellants
submitted in the Appeal and Reply Briefs. Arguments that Appellants could
have made but chose not to make in the Briefs are deemed to have been
waived. See 37 CFR 41.37(c)(1) (vii)(eff. Sept. 13, 2004). See also In re
Watts, 354 F.3d 1362, 1368, 69 USPQ2d 1453, 1458 (Fed. Cir. 2004).
3
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