Appeal No. 1997-2297 Page 6
Application No. 08/337,636
1984); and In re Rinehart, 531 F.2d 1048, 1052, 189 USPQ 143,
147 (CCPA 1976).
We begin with the rejection of claims 1, 2, 6, and 9
under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Koker. Turning
first to claim 1, the examiner asserts (answer, page 5) that
"Koker indicates that the buffer (inverter I1)[sic, INV1] has
transistors with gate sizes equal to the pullup [sic, pull-up]
transistors." Koker teaches (figure 2) an inverter INV1
coupled to the output of a Schmitt trigger. However, Koker
does not disclose a buffer having a first input gate size of a
pull-down device that is at least five times greater than the
first gate size. To overcome this deficiency in the teachings
of Koker, the examiner has made a determination that this
difference would have been obvious to an artisan. The
examiner takes the position (id., pages 5 and 6) that "it is
[sic, was] notoriously well known to implement relatively
large transistors at the output of a buffer in order to have
adequate driven power for succeeding circuit stages." The
examiner concludes that "it would have been obvious to have
implemented an inverter with large transistor gate widths as
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