Appeal No. 1997-0317
Application No. 08/160,275
teachings of the admitted prior art and the IBM
reference because one of ordinary skill in the art
at the time Appellants’ invention was made would
have had no motivation to make such a combination.
One of ordinary skill in the art would not have used
the barrel shifter of the IBM reference in the print
head of the admitted prior art because the barrel
shifter serves an entirely different purpose
(manipulating a set of data by shifting the data
left or right by a desired number of bits) from the
purpose of the shift registers/driver ICs of the
admitted prior art (serially transmitting data for
eventual parallel output)....Similarly, the IBM
reference provides no indication that the barrel
shifter recited therein could have been used in
implementing a print head or a driver IC. (Brief-
pages 9 and 10.)
The Examiner contends that the purpose of combining
the references would be for “enhancing shifting speed between
registers.” (Answer-page 5.)
We agree with Appellants. There is no motivation in
the AAPA to look for a barrel shifter or any other adjustable
length shift register other than using the hindsight of
Appellants’ improvement. Surely, there are many adjustable
length shift registers in the prior art, but the only
suggestion of its desirability in a print head is found in
Appellants’ specification, and not under the heading of “prior
6
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007