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
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