Appeal No. 97-2657
Application 08/359,286
each time its corresponding device accesses the bus" as
recited in claim 12. On pages 9 through 12 of the brief and
in the reply brief, Appellant argues that Watanabe does not
suggest modifying the Watanabe arbitration method or apparatus
to become Appellant's invention.
Upon a close review of Watanabe, we fail to find
that Watanabe teaches or suggests a timer that has a value
indicating
an elapsed time since the at least one device last accessed
the bus and an arbiter granting the device accessed the bus
based upon the value of the timer. We note that the Watanabe
abstract states that the counter section counts the duration
of the bus occupation of the bus master. Watanabe further
teaches that priority is given to the bus master with the
shortest occupation time. We further note in column 2, lines
20-30, that Watanabe
teaches a counter section 5 for counting each duration of bus
5
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