Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
DETAILED ACTION
2. This Office Action responds to the Application filed on 5/27/2022 and IDS filed on 5/27/2022. Claims 5/27/2022 are pending.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
3. The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
4. Claims 1-7 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 1 recited “1. A transformer network for setting characteristics of gates in a circuit, the transformer network trained with gate characteristic distributions from a technology library, the transformer network comprising: an encoder; and a decoder;
the transformer network configured to characterize a combinatorial gate sequence input into to improve one or more operational characteristics of the circuit based on an effort level setting applied to the decoder”, however it is not apparent what the encoder represents and what the encoder is encoding that would characterize the combinatorial gate sequence. It is not apparent what the decoder represents and what the decoder is decoding in order characterize the combinatorial gate sequence. It is not apparent of the relationship among the decoder and the encoder, that would allow for the characterizing of the combinatorial gate sequence.
As per claims 2-7 are rejected to for incorporating the above limitations into the claims by dependency.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
5. The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
6. Claim(s) 1 and 4-7 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Yang (“Pre-Routing Path Delay Estimation Based on Transformer and Residual Framework”, Tai Yang, Guoqing He, Peng Cao, February 21, 2022, IEEE) in view of Vaswani (“Attention is All You Need”, 31st Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2017), Long Beach, CA, USA).
As per claim 1, Yang discloses:
A transformer network for setting characteristics of gates in a circuit, the transformer network trained with gate characteristic distributions from a technology library, the transformer network (See Abstract, pre-routing path delay…transformer network, See Section I, II, and Section III) comprising:
an encoder (See Figure 4, i.e. encoder, See Section IV. Pre-routing path delay prediction framework, See Pages 185-187); and
the transformer network configured to characterize a combinatorial gate sequence input into to improve one or more operational characteristics of the circuit (See Pages 185-187, Section II & Section III & Section IV –[Prior art characterize timing of combinatorial gate (Figure 2) , therefore improve circuit timing by using the transformer]).
Yang does not teach: a decoder, and an effort level setting applied to the decoder.
However, Vaswani discloses: a decoder, and an effort level setting applied to the decoder (See Pages 2-3, i.e. transformer …both encoder and decoder, See Page 3, i.e. decoder…modify the self-attention sub-layer in the decoder –[prior art modify decoder of the transformer correspond to the level setting as cited above])
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the
art at the effective filing date of the invention to incorporate the teaching of Vaswani into
the teaching of Yang because it would allow designer to develop models to be more
parallelizable with less time to train (See Vaswani, Abstract).
As per claim 4, Yang and Vaswani discloses all of the features of claim 1 as discloses above wherein Yang also discloses a weighted cross-entropy loss function employing as a weight value a normalized mean square error (MSE) of F04 delay values of the gates in the gate sequence (See Page 187-188, i.e. root mean squared error).
As per claim 5, Yang and Vaswani discloses all of the features of claim 1 as discloses above wherein Yang also discloses the transformer network further configured to: select sizes of gates in the gate sequence to optimize timing, power, area, or combinations thereof for the gate sequence (See Table 1, i.e. cell type…driven strength, Pages 185-187, Section II & Section III & Section IV).
As per claim 6, Yang and Vaswani discloses all of the features of claim 1 as discloses above wherein Yang also discloses wherein the transformer network models the propagation of signals through the gate sequence (See Pages 185-187, Section II & Section III & Section IV).
As per claim 7, Yang and Vaswani discloses all of the features of claim 1 as discloses above wherein Vaswani also discloses wherein the encoder and the decoder each comprise exactly two encoding and decoding stages, respectively (See Pages 2-3, i.e. transformer …both encoder and decoder –[each decoder/encoder include multi-head attention & aDD&Norm being the two stages]).
Allowable Subject Matter
7. Claims 8-20 are allowed.
8. Claims 2 and 3 would be allowable if rewritten to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), 2nd paragraph, set forth in this Office action and to include all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
9. The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
With respect to claims 8-20, the prior art does not teach the combination of
limitations recited in independent claim 8 and independent claim 15, wherein claims 9-14 depend directly and/or indirectly from independent claim 8 – wherein claims 16-20 depend directly and/or indirectly from independent claim 15.
With respect to claims 2 and 3, the prior art does not teach the limitations of claim 2, wherein claim 3 depend on claim 2.
Conclusion
10. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to NHA T NGUYEN whose telephone number is (571)270-1405. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 8:00AM-5:00PM.
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/NHA T NGUYEN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2851