Appeal No. 97-0320
Application No. 08/096,261
Müller and Mizuno by asserting lack of motivation for the
skilled artisan to look to Mizuno to supplement the teachings
of Müller (Brief, page 10). In Appellant's view, Müller's
provision of a memory fault identification feature negates the
need to look to Mizuno for this teaching. The Examiner,
however, has cited Mizuno for the sole purpose of providing a
teaching of outputting defective cell position data in serial
form (Answer, pages 3-5). The fact that a particular prior
art reference may teach features which overlap the teachings
of another reference does not devalue its use in supplementing
features which may be lacking in such other reference.
In an analogous argument, Appellant submits (Brief, pages
11 and 12) that, since Müller provides for the output of a
memory repair strategy to an external programming means, the
addition of Mizuno's teaching of rewriting of the defective
memories from outside the memories is superfluous. After
careful review, however, it is our view that Appellant has
misinterpreted the description of the operation of the system
of Müller. It is clear that Müller's disclosure provides for
alternative execution procedures for the memory repair
strategy, i.e. either internally or externally. The Müller
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