Appeal No. 1998-0153
Application No. 08/497,227
the examiner has set forth a prima facie case of obviousness with the combination of the
teachings of the admitted prior art and Ta. Appellants have not shown insufficient
evidence by the examiner of obviousness or by rebutting the prima facie case with
secondary evidence.
Appellants argue the language of claim 1 on page 9 of the brief, but address this
language as it relates directly to the teaching of Ta rather than addressing the combination
of the admitted prior art as modified by Ta. We disagree with appellants.
Appellants argue that the circuit of Ta would have to be modified in some manner in
order to achieve the same operation as appellants’ claimed circuit. (See brief at page 10.)
We agree with appellants, but disagree that there is no suggestion in the prior art. Clearly,
Ta discloses the usefulness of a Schmitt Trigger with hysteresis to stablize an output
signal. (See Ta at col. 6, lines 30-37.) With this suggestion, in our view, the skilled artisan
would have been motivated to stablize the output of the charging/discharging circuit of a
buzzer for a seat belt or other accessory monitor. The skilled artisan would have therefore
been required to interface the two components of the system together and the combination
would have met the language of claim 1. This combination would have been clearly within
the level of skill in the art. Therefore, we will sustain the rejection of independent claims 1,
4, and 8. Since appellants have
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