Appeal No. 2006-3044 Page 7
Application No. 10/285,939
Since appellants’ arguments with respect to this rejection have treated these
claims as a single group which stand or fall together, we will consider
independent claim 1 as the representative claim for this rejection. See
37 C.F.R. § 41.37(c)(1)(vii)(2004).
Appellants argue that the cited references do not teach nor suggest
“buffer elements each being uniquely assigned to one of said command
tags,” as claimed [brief, page 6, emphasis added]. Appellants further argue
that the examiner’s interpretation of the term “uniquely” contradicts the
dictionary definition of “unique” [id.]. Appellants assert that Harriman’s
disclosure of multiple buckets that may be associated with a single command
tag teaches away from the language of the claim [brief, page 7].
The examiner disagrees [answer, page 18]. The examiner argues that
Harriman’s buffer unit (i.e., Read Data Return Buffer (RDRB) 270 of fig. 2A)
stores received response data (col. 5, lines 52-65), where the buffer unit
(RDRB 270) has a plurality of buffer elements (buckets 272, fig. 2A) with
each bucket being uniquely assigned to one of the command tags (col. 9,
lines 64-67) [answer, page 18]. The examiner asserts that Harriman’s load
logic uses the command tag to load the command response into appropriate
bucket(s) in the RDRB (i.e., buffer) and this implies that each buffer element
is uniquely assigned to one of the command tags [id.].
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