Appeal No. 1997-4120 Page 6
Application No. 08/347,341
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 address the appellant’s arguments.
Regarding the obviousness of claim 4, the appellant
argues, “[s]ynchronization is carried out by the synchronous
processing circuit 101 of Fig. 1 [of Kametani], and it is not
clear from the reference that this circuit relies on the
contents of a common storage area as required by independent
claim 4 of the present application.” (Appeal Br. at 5.) He
also argues that Papadopoulos “fails to disclose the
processor/common storage area/interrupt controller
configuration which is the subject matter of the present
application.” (Reply Br. at 3.)
In response, the examiner opines that the claim language
“does not indicate that the data set or common storage area is
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