Appeal No. 94-4061
Application 07/659,683
application disclosure as it would be interpreted by
one possessing the ordinary level of skill in the
pertinent art.
In the instant case, the examiner is of the opinion
that the use of the term "watchdog instruction decoder" is a
misnomer, because the address decoder 16 does not decode watchdog
instructions. The appellant counters:
In comprehending the import of this language, a
person of ordinary skill in the art would also resort
to the specification which, in one embodiment, regards
certain addresses output by a microprocessor as
watchdog instructions. See, for example, lines 14-19
on page 7 and lines 4-6 on page 9. In the disclosed
embodiment, when each address constituting a watchdog
instruction is received on the address bus 14 of Fig.
1, the decoder 16 decodes the address as a watchdog
instruction and provides an activation signal on one of
the lines L1 through L4 of the decoder 16.
Accordingly, the execution of each watchdog instruction
is the provision of the address on the address bus 14
in response to which the address decoder 16, acting as
a watchdog instruction decoding means, decodes the
watchdog instruction (that is, the address) to provide
a respective one of a plurality of activation signals
on one of a plurality of output lines, as recited in
claim 9. [Brief at page 9]
We are in agreement with appellant and note further that the term
"watchdog decoder" in claim 9 need not comport with the strict
meaning of a "decoder" because an appellant may be his own
lexicographer as long as the words in the claims are clear. See,
e.g., Jonsson v. Stanley Works, 903 F.2d 812, 821, 14 USPQ2d
1863, 1871 (Fed. Cir. 1990).
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