Ex Parte Steele - Page 10

                 Appeal 2007-2218                                                                                        
                 Application 10/035,595                                                                                  


                 Therefore, Appellant has not established that the Examiner erred with                                   
                 respect to this contention.                                                                             
                        As to claims 9-14, Appellant fails to point out any structural or                                
                 functional limitation that distinguishes these claims over the prior art.  As we                        
                 noted in the claim interpretation above, no such limitations exist.  Therefore,                         
                 Appellant has not established that the Examiner erred with respect to the                               
                 rejection of these claims.                                                                              
                        Since Appellant has not separately argued the remaining rejected                                 
                 claims, they stand or fall with claim 1 or the claims from which they depend.                           
                                                                                                                        
                                                   35 U.S.C. § 103                                                       
                        The Lynch patent parallels the Huang patent in that both append a                                
                 status tag to a floating point operand to improve on the conventional method                            
                 of handling special status operands.  As above with Huang, Appellant                                    
                 correctly points out that the appended tags of Lynch do not correspond with                             
                 the limitations of claim 1.  However, also as above with Huang, the                                     
                 conventional background art of Lynch (cols. 1 and 2) does correspond to the                             
                 subject matter of claim 1.                                                                              
                        Lynch’s background art disclosure differs from Huang in that Lynch                               
                 describes the functions to be performed (encoding, determining special                                  
                 encoding, decoding, etc.) and fails to explicitly disclose specific structures                          
                 for performing the disclosed background art functions.  However, Lynch                                  
                 also specifically discloses that “logic circuits” comprise his instruction                              
                 processing pipeline invention.  See Lynch’s figures 1-4.   We conclude that                             
                 the level of skill in the art as demonstrated by Lynch is sufficient that one                           

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