Appeal No. 2005-2557 6
Application No. 09/204,585
The examiner responds that the “thrust of the instant invention” is the same as the
teaching of Yung and that Luan teaches programmable partitioning [answer, pages 11-
13]. Appellants respond that similarity in “thrust” of the claimed invention and the prior
art plays no role in the proper legal analysis of obviousness. Appellants also respond
that the examiner’s analysis is incorrect and that the memory banks of Luan cannot
correspond to the structures recited in the claimed invention [reply brief, pages 7-8].
We will not sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims 1-7, 9-14 and 23-27 for
essentially the reasons argued by appellants in the briefs. We agree with appellants
that there is no motivation to apply the general programmable memory configurations of
Luan to the local and global buffers of Yung. There is no suggestion that programmable
memory partitioning, as generally taught by Luan, can be applied to
register file segments related to global and local registers in a device as taught by Yung.
We also agree with appellants that the examiner cannot rely on the fact that the applied
prior art may be the same as or similar to the “thrust” of the claimed invention. Since
separately argued claims 8 and 28 depend from claims 7 and 27, respectively, we also
do not sustain the examiner’s rejection of these claims.
We now consider the examiner’s rejection of the claims based on Yung, Luan
and Nishimoto. These claims all have recitations similar to the claims considered
above. Since Nishimoto does not overcome the deficiencies of Yung and Luan
discussed above, we also do not sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims 2 and 15-22
for the reasons discussed above.
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