Appeal No. 96-3442
Application No. 08/253,884
Appellant argues on page 4 of the Brief that the Examiner
has improperly used a “hindsight” approach to combine the
teachings of the prior art. Appellant contends on page 4 of
the Brief
One indication that the Examiner has improperly
used this “hindsight” approach is the fact that neither
the Shin patent nor the Sobue et al. patent even arguably
relates to bootstrap circuits. The Examiner has not
cited even a single prior art document that discloses
bootstrap circuits as a basis for his rejection. Thus,
the entire basis for the Examiner’s rejection stems not
from the Examiner’s search of the prior art, but
from applicant’s disclosure.
The Examiner has responded (Answer, page 6) that
“hindsight” has not been used since the motivation for the
combination is not that Shin teaches a bootstrap circuit but
rather a specific driver which could be employed for
Appellant’s general driver illustrated in Fig. 1 of the
specification.
On this particular point we must disagree with Appellant.
The prior art teaching of a bootstrap circuit is provided by
the description at page 3 of Appellant’s specification and
further illustrated in Fig. 1 of the drawings. The fact that
the secondary reference to Shin does not disclose a bootstrap
circuit is not necessarily fatal to the proposed combination
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