Appeal No. 2001-2125
Application No. 08/906,537
Cir. 1984). These showings by the Examiner are an essential part
of complying with the burden of presenting a prima facie case of
obviousness. Note In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d
1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
With respect to independent claims 1, 12, 17, and 18, the
Examiner, as the basis for the obviousness rejection, proposes to
modify the disclosed circuitry of Taborn which describes, as
illustrated in Figure 1, a cooperative combination of a multiplier
(20) and an accumulator (23 and 30). As recognized by the Examiner
(Answer, page 4), Taborn “. . . does not specifically disclose the
structure of the multiplier and thus does not teach a coding of the
multiplier, a plurality of adder stages and an adding of round bits
as claimed.” To address these deficiencies, the Examiner turns to
De Angel which discloses multiplier circuitry utilizing Booth
encoding in which the “rounding bits” are not added in the various
adder stages but, rather, are processed by the following adder 30.
In the Examiner’s analysis (id.), the skilled artisan, motivated by
power saving advantages, would have found it obvious to provide
Taborn with a multiplier as taught by De Angel, with the combined
teachings resulting “. . . in a combination of a multiplier and an
accumulator which does not add the ‘rounding bit’ in the partial
product adder stages but in the accumulator as claimed.”
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