Appeal 2007-2127
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,621
and "multithreading" must be given their ordinary meanings in the art and
Phillips v. AWH does not require otherwise. The fact that Patent Owner is
mistaken in his understanding that the embodiment disclosed in the
specification can be described as "multithreading" does not justify giving
"threads" and "multithreading" non-standard definitions.
"Interruptible" means "capable of being interrupted" or "capable of
being preempted." It does not mean that a thread is always interrupted. If a
thread finishes its subtask before the end of a timeslice, it is not interrupted.
However, an executing thread must be capable of being interrupted at the
end of a timeslice. Independent claims 1, 4, 6, 18, 22, 24, 26, 69, and 75 all
require preempting an executing thread in response to each actuation of the
interrupt operation, which can only happen if all threads are interruptible.
Independent claims 10, 14, and 17 only recite interrupting execution of a
first thread, but do not preclude interrupting execution of all threads, and
Patent Owner contends that these claims cover conventional preemptive
multithreading in which all threads are interruptible. Independent claims 1,
18, 22, and dependent claim 25 recite that the threads alternate and perform
successive incremental portions of their respective subtasks, which requires
that both threads are interrupted before finishing their subtasks.
The definition of "multithreading" as "concurrent asynchronous
preemptive time-sliced execution of a plurality of threads of instructions
located within the same software program," expressly requires that at least a
plurality of threads are interruptible. Since there are only two possibilities
for threads in Patent Owner's invention, the compiler and editor, both (i.e.,
all) must be interruptible to meet the Patent Owner's definition. Moreover,
one of ordinary skill in the art would interpret "preemptive multithreading,"
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