Appeal No. 2001-2125
Application No. 08/906,537
In response to the obviousness rejection, Appellants assert
several arguments in support of their contention that the Examiner
has failed to establish a prima facie case of obviousness. In
particular, Appellants assert (Brief, pages 8-10) that no clear
motivation for combining Taborn with De Angel has been provided by
the Examiner, and, even if combined, the ensuing structure would
not result in the particular combination as claimed.
After reviewing the arguments of record from both Appellants
and the Examiner, we are in general agreement with Appellants’
position as stated in the Brief. In particular, our interpretation
of the disclosure of De Angel coincides with that of Appellants,
i.e., the adder stage 30, which the Examiner asserts is adding
“round bits” A1-A7, is merely an end-stage adder for the multiplier
itself. Given this disclosure of De Angel, it is not apparent as
to how and in what manner Taborn would be modified to produce the
structure as claimed in which “round bits” are provided as inputs
to the accumulator part of the multiply/accumulator cooperative
combination.
We recognize that the Examiner, in the “Response to Argument”
portion of the Answer at page 6, suggests the well-known aspects of
modifying a multiplier to form a multiplier/accumulator by
introducing a 3-2 carry save adder between a multiplier array and a
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