Appeal No. 2002-2238
Application No. 09/107,768
The examiner has found that Mahalingam discloses all of the
claimed invention except for powering down the entire bus and
restoring power when the failed device has been swapped. The
examiner has additionally taken official notice of a fact as
follows:
Regarding Claim 3, Official Notice is take [sic] with regards
to the removable [sic] of power to an entire bus during a hot
swap and restoring the power to the entire bus when it has
finished, in an analogous art to enable a hot swap operation
without having the added the [sic] complexity of controlling
power to each device on the bus individually. By powering
down the entire bus it reduces the number of circuits and
control lines needed for hot plug, but it does limit create
[sic] bus down time during hot swapping (Paper 7, page 3,
lines 10-15).1
The appellants have not provided any additional arguments as
regards claim 3, other than to note that claim 3 was rejected
under a different statutory basis.
As we have reversed the rejection of claim 1, from which
claim 3 depends, we likewise reverse this rejection for the
1 Although the appellants have not challenged this finding
directly, we observe that the wording of the finding itself is
somewhat vague. In other words, we find it difficult to ascertain
what exactly the examiner has taken official notice of. Does the
examiner mean to say that it is well known in the art to turn off
the entire bus in a hot swap operation for computer maintenance?
Or does this finding pertain to an undefined “analogous art?” Or
that it is known to shut the whole bus down instead of a single
socket in order to reduce the complexity of the system? As we
have no way of knowing the examiner’s mindset other than through
the written record, it is imperative that a clear statement of any
Official Notice be made. By way of observation, we query whether
shutting down the entire bus (as opposed to a single slot) would
impair other functions and data access, as suggested by the
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