Appeal No. 97-2982 Page 5
Application No. 08/219,554
103, the patent examiner bears the initial burden of
establishing a prima facie case of obviousness. A prima facie
case is established when the teachings from the prior art
itself would appear to have suggested the claimed subject
matter to a person of ordinary skill in the art. If the
examiner fails to establish a prima facie case, an obviousness
rejection is improper and will be overturned. In re
Rijckaert, 9 F.3d 1531, 1532, 28 USPQ2d 1955, 1956 (Fed. Cir.
1993). With this in mind, we analyze the examiner’s
rejection.
The examiner begins the rejection by observing that
Fischer describes a system comprising host processors; a
controller, which is “a SCSI initiator,” (Examiner’s Answer at
3); and SCSI targets. (Id. at 4.) Next, the examiner
describes the reference as follows.
Fischer on column 2, lines 35-59, describes how
the processors and targets communicate between each
other. There is a Mailbox or storage means given to
each processor modules (see column 4, lines 53-62)
and I/0 adaptors with Queue Descriptors for each I/0
device in the Mailboxes (see columns 5-7) for
storing ATTENTION DATA (see Module Attention and
Device Attention on columns 7-8 and 29, line 45 et
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007