Appeal No. 1998-2712
Application No. 08/478,429
match result would have been useless without a way of determining the location of the
matched data in memory and, therefore, the artisan would have been led to store the value
of a counter keeping track of the shifting operation of Szczepanek in order to identify the
location of the match.
The instant claims have been amended from those in the earlier case. In that case,
independent claim 1 called for a means connected to the comparator “for storing signals
indicative of the occurrence of a match” with dependent claim 2 limiting the storing means
to store, “for each indicated match, a counter value identifying which row contained the
match.” Each one of the instant claims on appeal recites that the means connected to the
comparator is “for storing the row addresses generated by the counter for each row which
causes a signal indicative of a match to be generated” or “for storing the identifying row
address for each row for which a match occurs between the
input signal and any rows of said array” or that “for each row which matches the input value,
storing the identifying row address of such row.” Thus, unlike the previous claims, the
instant claims all recite and require, more specifically, that a “row address” is stored for
each row that matches an input value. We find nothing in either of the applied references,
or in a combination thereof, that is suggestive of storing a “row address” of a row when it is
determined that a match has been generated by the comparison operation.
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