Appeal No. 1998-0711
Application 07/989,027
are not monitored and their status is not fed back to the
control unit. Only the effect of the drivers is monitored.
For example, the driver in a conventional brake control system
is not directly monitored, but the effect of the driver is
monitored by taking measurements of vehicle parameters such as
wheel speed. This is the type of control taught by the closed
loop control systems of Hartford and Majeed.
The independent claims on appeal, however, are
directed to the data flow path that runs in a serial chain
from the first control unit MC 1[Figure 1], the serial OUT
line, amplifier stages VS 1 to VS n, and the serial IN line
back to control unit MC 1. The applied prior art has no
teachings or suggestions with respect to this claimed serial
data path, and this claimed feature is not obvious despite the
examiner’s beliefs to the contrary. The claimed serial data
path is fundamentally different from the closed loop data path
of Hartford and Majeed as identified by the examiner.
The examiner’s findings that serial communication and
closed loop systems were known in the art are not sufficient
to support a conclusion that the claimed invention would have
been obvious. The examiner’s findings fail to address the
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