Appeal No. 1997-3911
Application 08/368,758
[t]o reject claims in an application under
section 103, an examiner must show an unrebutted
prima facie case of obviousness. See In re Deuel,
51 F.3d 1552, 1557, 34 USPQ2d 1210, 1214 (Fed. Cir.
1995). In the absence of a proper prima facie case
of obviousness, an applicant who complies with the
other statutory requirements is entitled to a
patent. See In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1445, 24
USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992). On appeal to
the Board, an applicant can overcome a rejection by
showing insufficient evidence of prima facie
obviousness or by rebutting the prima facie case
with evidence of secondary indicia of
nonobviousness. See id.
The rejection based on Yamaguchi in view of Patrick
Yamaguchi, like appellants, is concerned with correcting
errors or bugs in the programming commands stored in the
ROM of a mass-produced microcomputer without requiring
replacement of the ROM (col. 1, lines 7-12 and 48-53). The
correction information is stored in a PROM (programmable read-
only memory) 6 and is used in place of the erroneous
information contained in mask ROM 1 when coincidence circuit 8
detects a match between the address generated by the
programmable counter PC 3 in CPU 2 and one of the ROM
addresses stored in register 7, which represent the
addresses of erroneous ROM information. All of these
elements, including the PROM, are mounted on a single chip
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