Appeal No. 1997-3792
Application No. 08/321,334
rejections and enter a new ground of rejection of claims 1-3,
5, and 7-10 pursuant to 37 CFR § 1.196(b).
A. The invention
The invention relates to circuitry for controlling the
clock speed and/or power supply voltage of a microprocessor in
order to reduce its power consumption while keeping its
temperature within acceptable limits. Referring to Figure 1,
a thermistor 21 adjacent to heat sink 22 delivers a signal
representing the temperature of microprocessor (CPU) 13
(Spec. at 11, lines 6-18). This temperature signal is applied
to microcontroller 20, which uses the heat management
algorithm depicted in Figures 5A and 5B to calculate the
maximum allowable clock frequency of the CPU (Spec. at 17,
lines 15-25). Specifically, steps 82-87 of this algorithm
(Fig. 5A) calculate an "expected" (i.e., future) temperature
T that is compared in step 88 (Fig. 5B) to T , the maximumk+2 MAX
allowable temperature for the CPU (Spec. at 18, line 18 to p.
19, line 18). Alternatively, the algorithm can compare the
current temperature to T (Spec. at 18, lines 12-17).
MAX
Depending on the result of the comparison and whether TURBO
operation has been asserted (step 91), the algorithm may or
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