Appeal 2007-1427
Application 09/826,240
reference. Therefore, we will sustain the Examiner’s rejection of claim 22
as being anticipated by Mittal.
Dependent claims 23 and 30
We consider next the Examiner’s rejection of claims 23 and 30 as
being anticipated by Mittal.
Appellant argues that Mittal does not disclose where altering the
power characteristic is performed by an action selected from the claimed
group (see claims 22 and 30). Instead, Appellant asserts that Mittal merely
teaches switching functional units between high-performance and low
performance states (see Mittal, col. 5, ll. 25-30) (Br. 12).
We disagree. We find Mittal expressly discloses removing power to
at least a portion of the reconfigurable circuit, as claimed (see Mittal, col. 5,
ll. 1-3, i.e., “reducing overall power consumption by reducing voltage and/or
clock rate”). Therefore, we will sustain the Examiner’s rejection of claims
23 and 30 as being anticipated by Mittal.
Dependent claim 24
We consider next the Examiner’s rejection of claim 24 as being
anticipated by Mittal.
Appellant acknowledges that Mittal discloses incrementing and
decrementing a counter at each clock cycle based on the activity of a
functional unit (see Mittal, col. 6, ll. 13-19). However, Appellant argues that
Mittal does not disclose an edge detection circuit (Br. 12-13).
The Examiner disagrees. The Examiner argues that in order to detect
a voltage level change, some sort of edge detection circuitry must be used to
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