Appeal No. 2003-0186
Application No. 09/033,529
“request” are not directly defined in the appellants’ specification. We interpret
these terms as having their plain meaning. The plain meaning of “monitoring” is
“to observe”, which is consistent with the use of the word in the appellants’
specification (see for example page 7 lines 24-26). The plain meaning of
“request” is “the act of asking for something to be done” which is also consistent
with the use of the word in the appellants’ specification (used in the context of
requests to access system memory, see appellants’ specification page 6, lines
10- 17). The term “clock cycles” is also not defined directly in the specification,
however its customary meaning as a measure of time is consistent with the use
of the term in the specification, (see for example page 13 line 19 which
discusses the counter to measure the period of the monitoring window as 500
clock cycles).
Finally, we find that in the limitation “the number of cycles for the non-
expedite requests being monitored by a non expedite counter” the use of plural,
“requests” and the singular “counter” necessarily implies that the claimed counter
counts the total of the cycles for all the non-expedite requests. Further, we find
that in the context of the independent claims, clock cycles is the amount of time
to perform the request and not the amount of time that requests have been
pending. The last limitation of claim 1 “processing the non-expedite requests for
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