Appeal No. 2001-2134
Application No. 09/101,276
page 7]. At page 7 of the principal brief, appellants give an
example, wherein light is launched into one of sixteen single
mode fibers in Wong, of how light emerging from the single mode
fiber 11 will have been attenuated by not less than 12dB, in
order to show that using Wong’s device as a combiner will not
result in a low-loss device, as in the claimed invention.
The examiner does not dispute this low-loss example but,
instead, argues that “low-loss” is not a claimed limitation.
While those exact words do not appear in independent claim 1, it
is clear that the claimed device is, indeed, directed to “low-
loss” devices. As explained by appellants in the reply brief,
since coupling devices are implicitly low-loss devices unless
explicitly directed to achieving a desired level of attenuation,
and the claims do not explicitly recite any desirable
attenuation, the artisan would have recognized that when
optically coupling a signal from fiber to a detector it is
desirable to minimize the attenuation of the signal. While this
rationale is debatable, and one could argue that by not reciting,
one way or the other, in the claims, that the device is “low-
loss,” the amount of loss is not a consideration, there is a more
compelling reason for treating the claimed device as “low-loss.”
As pointed out by appellants, at page 2 of the reply brief,
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