Appeal No. 1997-3499
Application 08/366,281
operation" (RBr4), are not commensurate in scope with the
claim language and are not persuasive.
Appellants argue (Br13):
The applicant concedes that the operation of
Watson's and Arnold's systems would include memory
scrubbing. However, such memory scrubbing would be an
automatically initiated, hardware-based function
performed without cooperation of a CPU. The signature
detection and virus checking performed by Watson and
Arnold's algorithm, on the other hand, would be performed
by the CPU. In this, there is no suggestion that a
memory scrubber or a scrubbing means be employed to
provide data for the purpose of producing a code
signature. Instead, the data would be provided to the
CPU by the memory controller after any soft or hard
errors were corrected by the scrubber, within its
capability. [Underlining added.]
The critical limitations at issue are "scrubbing means
for the continuous autonomous detection and correction of soft
bit errors in said data stored in said memory" and "providing
one or more items of said data read by said scrubbing means
from a first memory address." Prior art autonomous scrubbing
means operate independently and transparently to the CPU
(specification, page 2, lines 9-11), as compared to
alternative "software scrubbing" schemes (specification,
page 2, lines 11-13). Although an autonomous scrubbing means
is part of the memory controller, it reads out, tests, and
rewrites addresses containing a single soft error with correct
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