Cypress Semiconductor Corporation

Patent Trials and Appeals Board

Mar 2, 2021

2019006438 (P.T.A.B. Mar. 2, 2021)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450
www.uspto.gov
APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO.
15/585,890 05/03/2017 Christian Wiencke CD16034 1280
60909 7590 03/02/2021
Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
198 Champion Court
San Jose, CA 95134
EXAMINER
ZAMAN, FAISAL M
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
2185
NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE
03/02/2021 ELECTRONIC
Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding.
The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication.
Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the
following e-mail address(es):
patents@cypress.com
patents@cypress.com
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
Ex parte CHRISTIAN WIENCKE, HANS VAN ANTWERPEN,
STEPHAN ROSNER, ROLAND RICHTER, JEAN-PAUL VANITEGEM,
and JAN-WILLEM VAN DE WAERDT
Appeal 2019-006438
Application 15/585,890
Technology Center 2100
Before JOHN A. JEFFERY, JENNIFER S. BISK, and LARRY J. HUME,
Administrative Patent Judges.
BISK, Administrative Patent Judge.
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Application 15/585,890

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DECISION ON APPEAL1
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 134(a), Appellant2 appeals from the
Examiner’s decision to reject claims 1–21. See Final Act. 1. We have
jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We REVERSE.
CLAIMED SUBJECT MATTER
The claims are directed to “determining the energy consumption of
components in a microcontroller.” Spec. ¶ 2. Claim 1, reproduced below, is
illustrative of the claimed subject matter:
1. An integrated circuit (IC) device comprising:
a component disposed within the IC device, the component
comprising a bus interface; and
an energy estimating circuit disposed within the IC device, the
energy estimating circuit coupled to the bus interface and
configured to:
receive data transfer signals indicating data transfers via
the bus interface;
determine a first number of data transfers based on the data
transfer signals;

1 Throughout this Decision we have considered the Specification filed May
3, 2017 (“Spec.”), the Final Rejection mailed November 20, 2018 (“Final
Act.”), the Appeal Brief filed May 15, 2019 (“Appeal Br.”), the Examiner’s
Answer mailed June 17, 2019 (“Ans.”), and the Reply Brief filed August 16,
2019 (“Reply Br.”).
2 We use the term “Appellant” to refer to “applicant” as defined in 37 C.F.R.
§ 1.42. Appellant identifies the real party in interest as Cypress
Semiconductor Corporation, is the real party in interest. Appeal Br. 1.
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determine a first measure of energy consumption by the
component based on the first number of data transfers and
a first energy coefficient, wherein the first energy
coefficient corresponds to an amount of energy consumed
associated with one data transfer; and
store the first measure of energy consumption.
REFERENCES
The prior art relied upon by the Examiner is:
Name Reference Date
Oe US 2009/0198385 A1 Aug. 6, 2009
Raghavan US 2011/0055836 A1 Mar. 3, 2011
Cunningham Andrew Cunningham, The PC inside your
phone: A guide to the system-on-a-chip,
ArsTechnica
Apr. 10, 2013
REJECTIONS
Claims 1–9, 11–13, and 15–21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as
being unpatentable over Oe, Raghavan, and Cunningham.3 Final Act. 2–9.
Claims 10 and 14 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as being
unpatentable over Oe and Cunningham. Final Act. 6–7.
OPINION
We review the appealed rejections for error based upon the issues
identified by Appellant, and in light of the corresponding arguments and
evidence. Ex parte Frye, 94 USPQ2d 1072, 1075 (BPAI 2010)

3 The Examiner discusses the rejection of claims 11–13 and 15 separately
from that of claims 1–9 and 16–21 because claims 11–13 and 15 depend
from claim 10, which is rejected only over Oe and Cunningham. Final
Act. 7. For convenience, we group all claims rejected over Oe, Raghavan,
and Cunningham together here and in our summary table at the conclusion
of this Decision.
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(precedential).
Rejection of Claims 1–9 and 16–214
The Examiner rejects independent claims 1 and 16 as obvious over the
combination of Oe, Raghavan, and Cunningham. Final Act. 2–3. The
Examiner relies on Oe as teaching the majority of the limitations. Id. For
example, the Examiner points to Oe’s load information management unit
220 as the claimed energy estimating circuit determining the number of
accesses to HDDs 204 and 205 or the number of data transfers to NIC 206
(Oe’s S11). Id.; Ans. 4–5. In addition, the Examiner points to Oe’s S12 for
determining energy consumption and Oe’s load information collecting unit
140 for storing that determination. Id. The Examiner relies on Cunningham
as “teach[ing] wherein plural components are interconnected and disposed
within an IC device.” Final Act. 3. According to the Examiner, “it would
have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention
was made to have combined Cunningham’s teachings of inter-system
communications with the teachings of Oe, for the purpose of providing
higher clock speeds and reduced interconnect latencies.” Id.
Appellant argues that a person of ordinary skill in the art would not
combine Oe and Cunningham in the manner asserted by the Examiner.
Appeal Br. 7–8, 10–13; Reply Br. 2–3. According to Appellant, “there is no
technical reason for one of skill in the art to consider cramming [Oe’s]

4 Because we agree with at least one of the dispositive arguments advanced
by Appellant, we need not reach the merits of Appellant’s other arguments.
See Beloit Corp. v. Valmet Oy, 742 F.2d 1421, 1423 (Fed. Cir. 1984)
(finding an administrative agency is at liberty to reach a decision based on “a
single dispositive issue”).
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client-server system onto a single chip, especially given the fact that the Oe
system also includes power taps and other power equipment.” Appeal Br. 8.
In addition, Appellant asserts that “Cunningham does not describe or suggest
that the purpose of its SoC is to integrate hard disk drives or NICs of the
conventional type described in Oe.” Id. (emphasis in original).
In response, the Examiner asserts that Oe’s hard disk drives (HDDs
204 and 205) and Cunningham’s memory are recognized as equivalents in
the art and the same is true of Oe’s network interface cards (NIC 206) and
Cunningham’s Ethernet chips. Ans. 5. According to the Examiner “[o]ne of
ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make these art-
recognized equivalent replacements and incorporate[] them into an
integrated circuit” in order to reduce interconnect latencies. Id. The
Examiner also explains that, in the proposed combination of Oe and
Cunningham, “[a]ll of the functionary that is present in the computer 200 of
Oe would remain but with the added benefit of reducing the interconnect
latency between the various components disposed within the computer 200”
and “rather than attempting to simply place a hard disk drive and network
interface card into an integrated circuit . . . , the proposed combination
would result in the system-on-a-chip as discussed in Cunningham replacing
the computer 200 of Oe, while maintaining all of the same functionality as
discussed in Oe.” Id. at 6–7.
We agree with Appellant that the Examiner has relied on Cunningham
for teachings beyond its disclosure. Cunningham is a four-page article that
teaches “chip manufacturing processes have improved,” such that it is “now
possible to cram more and more of these previously separate components
[such as CPU, graphics, and RAM] into a single chip” in order to reduce
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space, system complexity, cost, and power consumption. Cunningham, 1.
In particular, Cunningham discusses smartphone and tablet chips that use a
“single, monolithic chip” that “includes what is essentially an entire
computer.” Id. at 2. Cunningham, however, does not discuss combining
components spread across multiple computers into a single chip or even a
single computer.
In contrast to Cunningham’s discussion of separate components in a
single device, Oe describes “a system for monitoring and controlling power
consumption” using “a power consumption monitor server 100” connected
through a network to various client computers. Oe ¶ 49. The portions of Oe
relied upon by the Examiner for the recited “energy estimating circuit
disposed within the IC device” are spread across devices connected by a
network in this client/server architecture. See, e.g., Oe Fig. 5 (showing
“Load Information Management Unit 220,” including HDDs 204/205 and
NIC 20, on computer 200 and “Load Information Collecting Unit 140” on
server 100); Fig. 18 (showing transmit load information S11 as being located
in computer 100 and estimate power consumption for each device S12 in
server 100).
We agree with Appellant that Cunningham’s disclosure does not
support the Examiner’s broad conclusions that it would have been obvious to
place all the relied upon components of Oe on a single chip. See Ans. 4–6.
According to the Examiner, the proposed combination of Oe and
Cunningham would include replacing (1) the hard disk drives of Oe with on-
chip memory, (2) the network interface chip of Oe with an Ethernet chip,
and (3) the network of Oe with an on-chip bus interface. See Ans. 4–6.
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Such substitutions have no support in Cunningham or any other portion of
the record to which we have been directed.
Accordingly, we are persuaded of error in the Examiner’s rejection of
claims 1 and 16 as obvious over the combination of Oe, Raghavan, and
Cunningham. These same deficiencies apply to the rejection of dependent
claims 2–9 and 17–21. We, therefore, reverse the Examiner’s rejection of
claim 1–9 and 16–21 over Oe, Raghavan, and Cunningham.
Rejection of Claims 10–15
The Examiner rejects independent claim 10 and dependent claim 14 as
obvious over the combination of Oe and Cunningham and dependent claims
11–13 and 15 as obvious over the combination of Oe, Cunningham, and
Raghavan. Final Act. 6–9. The deficiencies described above with respect to
independent claim 1 and 16 also apply to the rejection of independent claim
10. We, therefore, reverse the Examiner’s rejection of claims 10 and 14
over Oe and Cunningham and claims 11–13 and 15 over Oe, Raghavan, and
Cunningham.
CONCLUSION
We reverse the Examiner’s rejections of claims 1–21.
DECISION SUMMARY
Claim(s)
Rejected
35 U.S.C. § Reference(s)/Basis Affirmed Reversed
1–9, 11–13,
15–21
103 Oe, Raghavan,
Cunningham
1–9, 11–13,
15–21
10, 14 103 Oe, Cunningham 10, 14
Overall
Outcome
1–21
REVERSED