Appeal No. 2002-1135
Application 09/416,497
only one type of request, for a current fairness interval or for
a next fairness interval, this is not the end of the analysis.
Claim 1 further recites "wherein the request is encoded with a
priority that identifies to which of the current fairness
interval and the next fairness interval the requests
corresponds," which requires a priority identifying a current
fairness interval or a next fairness interval, as distinguished
from a priority within the fairness interval (see specification,
p. 7, lines 21-25). This priority encoding limitation has not
been shown to exist in Haynie or Duckwall.
The examiner does not rely on any portion of Haynie besides
from the abstract. The abstract of Haynie discusses
prioritization of bus request signals and that an arbiter
determines which bus request signal has the highest priority and
whether the device follows a two-wire bus arbitration protocol or
a three-wire bus arbitration protocol. The examiner apparently
relies on the statement that "[t]he expansion bus grants access
to the bus to the device having the highest priority once a
previous device if any, has relinquished the bus" (abstract).
The examiner considers the time period after a previous device
has relinquished the bus to be a "next fairness interval." 3 This
3 Although the examiner refers to a definition of "fairness
interval" from Newton's Telecom Dictionary at EA9, no copy is
provided and our version of Newton's, 15th edition, 1999, does
not contain an entry for "fairness interval." However, the
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