Appeal No. 2005-0001
Application No. 09/268,902
power zone in the integrated circuit core, as presently claimed.” Further, on page
10 of the brief, appellant argues, “the Examiner admits that Mitsuhashi does not
teach or suggest accepting design information of the integrated circuit core
entered in response to a prompt as presently claimed.”
The examiner states on page 11 of the answer “the invention of
Mitsuhashi is not included to teach accepting design information of an integrated
circuit core entered in response to a prompt as this feature is taught by the
invention of Huddleston.” Further, on pages 12 and 13 of the answer, the
examiner states:
The Examiner maintains that one having ordinary skill in the art would
consider the “sectional regions” of Mitsuhashi to be the “at least one
power zone” since Appellant defines “power zone” as one of “a memory
block, a digital block, a analog block, and a pad cell block” (instant
specification, page 7, lines 10-11) and the “sectional regions” of
Mitsuhashi comprise a plurality of gates and/or transistors making up
analog or digital blocks (Mitsuhashi, column 7, lines 17-27). The Examiner
further asserts that one having ordinary skill in the art would consider
“extracting electrical characteristic parameters, such as the number of
gates, dimensions of transistors, load capacities of the gates, and clock
frequencies related to the gates, [from] each of the sectional regions” (i.e.
power zones) to meet the limitation for accepting information for at least
one power zone.
The Examiner also asserts that the term “accepting” can be broadly
interpreted in accordance with a plurality of definitions, such as “to regard
as true” or “to be able to hold”, and therefore the limitation for “accepting
information for at least one power zone” would also be met by the cited
portions of Mitsuhashi that regard the electric characteristics to be true as
well as hold these characteristics in processing components.
We concur with the examiner’s assessment of the term “accepting” and
the examiner’s finding that Mitsuhashi teaches power zones as claimed, the
issue of accepting design information of an integrated circuit core entered in
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