Appeal No. 96-1426
Application 08/001,863
Claims 1, 3, 6, and 7 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 102(a) as being anticipated by
Vassiliadis.
OPINION
We reverse.
"Anticipation is established only when a single prior art reference discloses, expressly or
under principles of inherency, each and every element of a claimed invention." RCA Corp. v.
Applied Digital Data Systems, Inc., 730 F.2d 1440, 1444, 221 USPQ 385, 388 (Fed. Cir. 1984).
Vassiliadis discloses "a data dependency collapsing arithmetic logic unit (ALU)," which
is the special three-to-one (three-operand, single-result) ALU of figure 9 to eliminate data hazard
interlocks using compounded instructions. By "collapses data dependency" it is meant "that a pair
of instructions can be executed even when one of the pair requires as an operand the result
produced by execution of the other of the pair of instructions" (column 3, lines 45-48). "The term
'compounding' refers to grouping of instructions contained in a sequence of instructions, the
grouping being for the purpose of concurrent or parallel execution of the grouped instructions.
At minimum, compounding is represented by 'pairing' of two instructions for simultaneous
execution." (Column 5, lines 13-19.) "The proposed apparatus of this invention collapses these
interlocks by deriving new functions that arise from combining the execution of instructions whose
operands present data hazards while retaining the execution of functions inherent in the instruction
set" (column 8, lines 25-30).
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