DETAILED ACTION
This office action addresses Applicant’s response filed on 12 May 2026. Claims 1-23 are pending.
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1-23 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Arunachalam (US 2006/0271894).
Claims 1-23 are directed to computer-readable media storing an integrated circuit (IC) design, the design comprising various limitations. However, the design is merely information, which has no new and non-obvious functional relationship with the medium. Being non-functional descriptive material, the design has no patentable weight even when the design is stored on a computer-readable medium. See MPEP § 2111.05. Arunachalam discloses a non-transitory machine-readable medium storing an integrated circuit design that represents a design of an IC that is manufactured over a substrate (Fig. 19, elements 1940 and 1980; ¶¶2, 559).
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 12 May 2026 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
Applicant asserts that Teig fails to teach various limitations of the integrated circuit (IC) design. Remarks 1. However, as discussed above, the design is non-functional descriptive material and thus has no patentable weight even when stored on a computer-readable medium.
Conclusion
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29 May 2026
/ARIC LIN/ Examiner, Art Unit 2851
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