Appeal No. 2005-0449
Application No. 09/498,559
For a number of reasons, we also cannot sustain the
examiner’s section 103 rejection of claims 1-13 as being
unpatentable over Vargha in view of Ko. First, the applied prior
art does not support the examiner’s conclusion that it would have
been obvious “to employ the resistor taught by Ko . . . in the
circuit of Vargha for the purpose of protecting the transistor”
(answer, page 5). This is because Ko does not teach that his
resistors perform the aforequoted function of “protecting the
transistor.” Even if Ko contained such a teaching, the
examiner’s obviousness conclusion still would be unsupported by
the applied prior art. This is because Vargha contains no
teaching that his Figure 1 transistor requires the protection of
a resistor. Indeed, for all we know based on the references
applied by the examiner, the provision of a resistor would render
the Figure 1 circuit of Vargha unsuitable for its earlier
discussed purpose of controlling the turn-on or turn-off of a
load circuit. Finally, the section 103 rejection still would be
improper even disregarding each of these aforementioned
infirmities. This is because the examiner has not established
(or even attempted to establish) that the proposed combination of
the applied reference teachings would supply the functional
deficiency of Vargha’s Figure 1 circuit. That is, the record
8
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007