Appeal No. 1997-4115 Page 7
Application No. 08/325,765
the claimed subject matter to a person of ordinary skill in
the art. (3) If the examiner fails to establish a prima facie
case, his obviousness rejection will be reversed. With these
in mind, we analyze the appellant’s arguments.
The appellant argues, “Chandra gives no information about
how flip-flops are used or could be used within any finite
state machine. Chandra does not even mention the term ‘flip-
flop’.” (Appeal Br. at 8.) He adds, “Washabaugh does not
disclose or suggest the use of flip-flops to store outputs of
a finite state machine, but rather, specifically teaches the
use of separate storage elements to store the state of the
finite state machine. See Figure 3 and column 4, lines 17
through 18.” (Id. at 9.)
The examiner replies, “Washabaugh does teach the
implementation of flip flops as claimed.” (Examiner’s Answer
at 10.) He adds, “applicants are [sic] suggested to look
closely to the language of columns 5 (line 51) - column 7
(line 22) of the Washabaugh reference in which state
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