Appeal No. 96-0517
Application 08/264,473
160 via a temperature compensation amplifier circuit 118. In
the final Office action, the examiner stated (at 5) that
it would have been obvious to one having ordinary skill
in the art to have applied Feldt's teachings to
applicant[s'] admitted prior art. The motivation for
this modification would have been to convert linear
scaled signals into decibel scaled signals by means of
exponential amplification. Gain control circuitry
typically utilizes signals which are scaled in terms of
decibels. Therefore, exponential conversion would permit
more accurate gain control.
In their brief (at 6), appellants argued that nothing in Feldt
suggests using an exponential characteristic to reduce the
time delay in switching between recording and reproducing
modes in the reproducing circuit for an MR head and asserted
that the only connection between Feldt and the present
invention is hindsight based on their disclosure. The
examiner responded in the Answer (at 4-5) by offering a
different rationale in support of the rejection. The new 6
rationale is that Feldt teaches how to avoid the problem
associated with increasing the gm value in the Figure 22
circuit to shorten the charging/discharging time, i.e., the
6Accordingly, we will treat the initial rationale, which
in any event is unpersuasive for the reasons given by
appellants, as withdrawn.
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