Appeal No. 2002-1135
Application 09/416,497
data to be transmitted in the next fairness interval, as
evidenced by the 1394 standard and Haynie. This does not address
the limitation of the "current fairness interval," nor the
limitation that "the request is encoded with a priority that
identifies to which of the current fairness interval and the next
fairness interval the requests corresponds," i.e., a priority
between fairness intervals, not a priority within the
corresponding fairness interval. If the examiner is relying on a
specific claim interpretation for not addressing the "current
fairness interval" limitation, such as an "arbitration request
for a current fairness interval or a next fairness interval"
being an alternative limitation that only requires a request for
one of the types of intervals, this should have been expressly
stated in the rejection since we cannot read minds (we see the
word "or" in bold in the quote, but there is no explanation of
why it has been emphasized in connection with appellants'
argument). Procedural due process and 35 U.S.C. § 132 of the
Patent Statute require that applicants be adequately notified of
the reasons for the rejection of claims so that they can decide
how to proceed. See In re Ludtke, 441 F.2d 660, 662, 169 USPQ
563, 565 (CCPA 1971).
Nevertheless, assuming that the examiner's rejection is
based on an unstated claim interpretation, and assuming that
claim 1 is broad enough to read on a state machine generating
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