Appeal No. 2005-0973 Application No. 09/740,669 In the instant case, the examiner contends that the term, “in-flight,” as in the claimed “in-flight field,” is not established in the art and that the artisan would be unable to assign an “in-flight field” without further detail as to what this encompasses. Claims 5 and 14 list fields which are included in the plurality of fields which are in each entry in the shift structure. One of those fields listed is “an in-flight field.” Page 14 of the specification specifies that a packet is “in- flight when the packet is being processed, such as if a packet is being read out of memory, being sent out onto the bus, and the like.” Thus, the “in-flight field” indicates if a packet is in- flight, as defined in the specification. Since the specification teaches what is in the in-flight field, and we find no reason to doubt what has been described in the specification, and claimed, we will not sustain the rejection of claims 5-8, and 14-18 under 35 U.S.C. § 112, first paragraph. The examiner bases the rejection on a notion that appellants describe a packet as in-flight and, at the same time, scheduled in the DMA, and that this is inconsistent. However, we agree with appellants, for the reasons set forth at page 5 of the brief, that there is no inconsistency and that an example shows 4Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007