Appeal No. 96-0908
Application 08/160,118
art and that person must be presumed to know something about
the art apart from what the references expressly disclose.
See In re Jacoby, 309 F.2d 513, 516, 135 USPQ 317, 319 (CCPA
1962); In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1447-48, 24 USPQ2d 1443,
1446-47 (Fed. Cir. 1992) (Nies, C.J., concurring).
The "art to which the subject matter pertains" in § 103
in this case is the art of computer hardware design and
computer instruction set design. We find that one of ordinary
skill in this art has a very high level of education,
training, and experience due to the complex nature of the
subject matter. One of ordinary skill in this art is presumed
to have knowledge of, at least, commercial computer designs
and instruction sets.
Content of the prior art
Diefendorff
Diefendorff discloses a load/store machine for executing
graphic Z-compare and pixel merge instructions. Diefendorff
discloses that, in response to a Z-compare instruction, a
first source operand which contains two 32-bit fields (S 0 and
Z
S 1) representing Z-values for two new pixels (S0, S1) is
Z
retrieved from register 52 and a second source operand which
- 6 -
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007