Appeal No. 2001-0820
Application No. 09/128,832
OPINION
We have carefully considered the entire record before us, and we will reverse the
obviousness rejection of claims 21 through 24, 29 and 31 through 33.
The examiner is of the opinion (final rejection, page 3) that “JMP A” is a first uncompressed
instruction that is a branch target, whereas the appellants argue (brief, page 4; reply brief, page 2)
that Yokota only shows a branch instruction as opposed to an uncompressed instruction that is a
branch target.
Yokota discloses (column 4, lines 65 and 66) that a program to be executed is compressed
“by unit of several modules as shown in FIG. 6.” When the program is compressed, “a table of
branch instruction to the program to be compressed and of branching addresses is made . . . , and a
non-branching sequence of instructions is compressed as a module . . .” (column 4, line 67 through
column 5, line 4). Yokota shows two branch instructions “JMP A” and “JMP B” (column 5, lines 5
through 7), and “each module is compressed” during the compressing process (column 5, lines 7
through 11). In subsequent inconsistent statements, Yokota indicates that “the branch instruction is
separately compressed” (column 5, lines 29 through 32) and that “the branch instruction itself is not
compressed” (column 5, lines 49 through 52). Based upon such disclosures in Yokota, it appears
that each of the modules is compressed while both branch instructions (i.e., JMP A and JMP B) are
compressed or both branch instructions are uncompressed. Thus, even if we assume for the sake of
argument that the branch instruction in Yokota is a branch target, it appears that the teachings of
Yokota are limited to two compressed branch instructions or to two uncompressed branch
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