Ex Parte ROMESBURG - Page 9




          Appeal No. 2002-1197                                                        
          Application 09/131,167                                                      

          In re Baxter Travenol Labs., 952 F.2d 388, 391, 21 USPQ2d 1281,             
          1285 (Fed. Cir. 1991) ("It is not the function of this court to             
          examine the claims in greater detail than argued by an appellant,           
          looking for nonobvious distinctions over the prior art.").                  
               We find that Koski teaches the limitation that "filter                 
          coefficients of said adaptive filter are updated only when a                
          prevailing value of the output signal of said microphone is                 
          within a predetermined range of possible output signal values"              
          (claim 1), as interpreted.  Koski discloses that echo cancelers             
          are known and usually employ an adaptive digital filter where the           
          parameters (coefficients) are updated whenever far-end speech               
          occurs (col. 1, lines 21-42).  Koski teaches that an improvement            
          is to not update the filter coefficients during double talk to              
          overcome the problem of distortion (col. 1, lines 43-63), which             
          indicates that the prior condition was to always update the                 
          coefficients for every signal, which is considered to meet the              
          limitations of claims 1, 13, 17, and 25, as broadly interpreted.            
          Because these are the only limitations argued, we sustain the               
          rejection of claims 1-4, 8-28, and 32-37.                                   
               IF the claims recited updating the filter coefficients only            
          upon the condition that the output signal of the microphone is              
          within a predetermined range of possible output signal values,              
          where the predetermined range was less than the total range of              
          possible output signal values, the examiner's rejection could not           

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