Appeal 2007-3623
Application 10/035,747
of “zero” and whose bit string has been assigned a status of representing
“zero.”1
Additionally, claims 21-26, 31, and 32 require a control unit for
handling a “floating point instruction,” and claims 40-43 and 51-54 require
“receiving a floating point instruction.”
Finally, claims 28, 35, 37, 46, and 48 fail to further limit the claimed
structure or functions. Rather, these claims merely recite the content of the
status information and do not further limit the claims from which they
depend.
Huang
As to claims 1-20, Appellant correctly points out that Huang does not
describe the invention of claims 1-20. Appellant has established that the
Examiner erred with respect to this contention as to claims 1-20.
As to claims 21-54, Appellant correctly points out that the device of
figure 4 of Huang relied on by the Examiner does not describe status
information embedded within a floating point operand as required by claims
21-54. Contrary to the Examiner’s contention (Answer 27), Huang’s “tag
value” does not constitute a teaching data within the floating point operand
as claimed. Rather, Huang discloses that the tag (status info) stands separate
from the operand (result). (FF 1 and 2).
1 We note that these claims would distinguish over the cited prior art based
on the operand if the claims were amended to require a single resulting
floating point operand that contains distinct parts which represent a value
and encoded status information.
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