Appeal No. 2005-0973
Application No. 09/740,669
teaching of a scheduler for DMA channel transfers. Specifically,
the examiner refers to column 4, line 46, through column 5, line
38, for a teaching of a plurality of fields in a parameter table,
and to column 5, lines 42-44, for queues that are sorted for
output to a traffic queue allocation manager. Moreover, the
examiner contends that Bass teaches a DMA bus arbitration based
on a straight priority fashion, at column 5, lines 60-64.
The examiner contends that while Bass does not use the term
“weights,” it would have been obvious that the terms “weight” and
“priority” are interchangeable in this context because both words
indicate an importance or superiority in relation to competing
entities. Thus, the examiner concludes, it would have been
obvious to combine the DMA scheduler of Bass with the shift
structure of Lee “in order to increase the speed of arbitration
by increasing sorting efficiency” (answer-page 5).
For their part, appellants contend that while Bass may
disclose fields in a parameter table, instant independent claims
1, 10, and 19 each recite that each entry in said shift structure
includes a plurality of fields. Appellants contrast this
limitation with Figures 1 and 9 of Bass, wherein the parameters
in TSPT 7 are not fields in an entry of queues Q0-Q31, and the
7
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