Appeal No. 1998-2874
Application No. 08/568,718
In view of the teachings of the admitted prior art, the
van de Plassche patents and Jackson, the examiner concludes
(Answer, page 4) that “the person having ordinary skill in the
art would have been motivated to synthesize the two approaches
disclosed by Jackson, i.e., to switch a number of contiguous
conversion cells according to the digital value to be
converted, having selected the cell from which to begin using
a random number generator, because Jackson teaches that both
the ‘round robin’ approach and
the random approach reduce the effects of nonequal component
values (see col. 2, line 9, and col. 6, line 68), thus
reducing (cancelling) noise.”
Although we agree with the examiner that Jackson
discloses two different approaches that can be used in the
digital-to-analog conversion process, we do not, however,
agree with the examiner that the skilled artisan would have
known from the teachings of record to combine the two
distinctly different approaches as appellants have done in
their disclosed and claimed invention. Appellants have
correctly argued (Brief, page 5) that “[t]here is no
suggestion or even a hint of a suggestion about sequentially
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