Appeal No. 1999-2250
Application No. 08/980,308
unconvinced by this argument for the reasons supra, with regard to independent claim
1.
With regard to the “duplication of parts” argument by the examiner, appellants
disagree. In appellant’s view, Chawki’s circulator C1 is not identical to circulator C2, the
first being a subtracting circulator and the latter being an adding circulator, which
means that the artisan would not have been led to duplicate circulator C1 and deploy it
on the right side of the Bragg grating arrangement in Figure 1 since this would
contradict the disclosed deployment of the adding circulator C2 on the right side of the
grating arrangement.
While the examiner does not respond to this argument, we are unconvinced by
appellants’ argument because the examiner is not suggesting “flipping” the circulators
C1 and C2 from one side of the Bragg grating to the other. Rather, the examiner is
merely suggesting duplicating the arrangement in Figure 1 of Chawki so that there are a
plurality of each of the circulators and Bragg gratings in redundant channels, for
example.
Without some specific reason contra, it would have been obvious, generally, to
duplicate elements of the prior art. Appellants have provided no reason why it would
not have been obvious to duplicate that already taught by Chawki so that there are
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