Prosecution Insights
Last updated: May 28, 2026
Application No. 18/205,407

SORT-TOP RASTERIZATION AND TILE RENDERING USING AN ACCELERATION STRUCTURE

Non-Final OA §103
Filed
Jun 02, 2023
Examiner
CLOTHIER, MATTHEW MORRIS
Art Unit
2614
Tech Center
2600 — Communications
Assignee
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OA Round
2 (Non-Final)
100%
Grant Probability
Favorable
2-3
OA Rounds
0m
Est. Remaining
99%
With Interview

Examiner Intelligence

Grants 100% — above average
100%
Career Allowance Rate
3 granted / 3 resolved
+38.0% vs TC avg
Minimal +0% lift
Without
With
+0.0%
Interview Lift
resolved cases with interview
Fast prosecutor
2y 1m
Avg Prosecution
14 currently pending
Career history
35
Total Applications
across all art units

Statute-Specific Performance

§103
96.7%
+56.7% vs TC avg
§102
3.3%
-36.7% vs TC avg
Black line = Tech Center average estimate • Based on career data from 3 resolved cases

Office Action

§103
DETAILED ACTION 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 . Response to Amendment 1. This action is in response to the amendment filed on 7/23/2025. Claims 1-3, 7-10, 14, and 16-18 have been amended. Claims 1-20 remain rejected in the application. Applicant’s amendments to the specification and claims have overcome each and every objection previously set forth in the Non-Final Office Action mailed 5/22/2025. Response to Arguments 2. Applicant’s arguments with respect to claim 1, and similarly claims 8 and 16, filed on 7/23/2025, with respect to the rejection under 35 U.S.C. 102 regarding that the prior art does not teach the limitation(s): “generating a list of graphics objects in the tile based on the frustum query, each graphics object in the list of graphics objects including a corresponding plurality of primitives represented by a second level of the hierarchy of the acceleration structure” have been considered. Additionally, arguments with respect to claim 2, and similarly claims 9 and 17, filed on 7/23/2025, with respect to the rejection under 35 U.S.C. 102 regarding that the prior art does not teach the limitation(s): “wherein the list of graphics objects indicates one or more graphics objects in the tile that intersect one or more planes of the frustum” have also been fully considered. However, arguments for both sets of claims are moot because of new grounds for rejection. Claim 1, and similarly claims 8 and 16, are now disclosed by Glushkov and Janus. Claim 2, and similarly claims 9 and 17, are now disclosed by Glushkov, Janus, and Bourd. 3. Regarding arguments to claims 3-7, 10-15, and 18-20, they are dependent on independent claims 1, 8, and 16 respectively. Applicant does not argue anything other than independent claim 1 (and similarly claims 8 and 16) and dependent claim 2 (and similarly 9 and 17). The limitations in those claims, in conjunction with combination, was previously established as explained. Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103 4. 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. 5. Claims 1, 3-8, 10-16, and 18-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Glushkov (WO-2022131949-A1) in view of Janus et al. (US-2020/0211261-A1, hereinafter "Janus"). 6. As per claim 1, Glushkov discloses: A method comprising: based on a frustum associated with a tile (Glushkov, page 4, lines 19-22, “A first aspect of this disclosure provides a device for recursive rasterization, the device being configured to determine a render target comprising a plurality of first tiles; obtain an acceleration structure; obtain one or more first frustums, wherein each first tile of the render target is associated with one first frustum; ...”) of a display space, (Glushkov, page 6, lines 11-13, “Such a frustum may also be referred to as a view frustum or a viewing frustum, and may correspond to a region of space of the scene, e.g., that may appear on a display when the rendered scene is displayed.”) performing a frustum query on at least a portion of an acceleration structure [[including a first level of a hierarchy and indicating a graphics object]] in the tile, (Glushkov, page 4, lines 22-24, “... select, for each first tile, first primitives from the acceleration structure, wherein the selected first primitives are included in the first frustum associated with the first tile; ...” and page 21, lines 23-29, “Further, various algorithms may be used to implement the functionality of the acceleration structure 101, for instance, for rendering 3D scenes. These algorithms may include BVH, OctTree, or MeshGrid. These algorithms can be very different, but as far as embodiments of the invention are concerned, it is only important that they can return the first primitives 102 or the second (or further) primitives 111, which are potentially visible, for example, included in some first frustums 103 or second (or further) frustums 110, respectively.”) the frustum query indicating a position (Glushkov, page 6, lines 19-22, “Moreover, an ‘acceleration structure’ may be a subroutine that allows deciding as quickly as possible, which objects from the scene, a particular ray, frustum or other primitive, are likely to intersect and reject large group of objects, which it is know for certain that the primitive will never hit.” and page 6, lines 8-10, “A ‘scene’ is a collection of 3D models, light sources and other kinds of objects in a world space, into which a camera may be placed, and is used to describe a scene for 3D rendering.”) of at least a portion of the graphics object relative to the frustum; (Glushkov, page 6, lines 22-23, “Finally, a ‘primitive’ may be basic drawing shape, for instance, at least one of a polygon and a triangle.”) generating a list of graphics objects in the tile based on the frustum query, each graphics object in the list [[of graphics objects including a corresponding plurality of primitives represented by a second level of the hierarchy of the acceleration structure; and]] (Glushkov, page 15, lines 23-26, “For example, the tile-specific first primitives 102 may be selected from the acceleration structure 101 by the device 100 using the corresponding tile-specific one or more first frustums 103, and may then be stored in the primitive list in association with their related first tile.” and page 15, line 32-page 16, line 1, “That is, the rasterizer 105 may access the primitive storage 104, and may obtain the first primitives 102 per (first) tile, for example, using the first primitive list. In particular, for each first tile of the plurality of first tiles, the first primitives 102 selected for said first tile are rasterized by the rasterizer 105, in order to obtain one first rasterized tile 106.”) rasterizing the graphics object in the tile of the display space based on the list of graphics objects. (Glushkov, page 4, lines 19-27, “A first aspect of this disclosure provides a device for recursive rasterization, the device being configured to determine a render target comprising a plurality of first tiles; obtain an acceleration structure; obtain one or more first frustums, wherein each first tile of the render target is associated with one first frustum; select, for each first tile, first primitives from the acceleration structure, wherein the selected first primitives are included in the first frustum associated with the first tile; write the selected first primitives into a primitive storage of a rendering pipeline; receive first rasterized tiles from a rasterizer of the rendering pipeline, wherein each first rasterized tile has been obtained by rasterizing the first primitives selected for one first tile of the render target; ...” and page 15, lines 23-26, “For example, the tile-specific first primitives 102 may be selected from the acceleration structure 101 by the device 100 using the corresponding tile-specific one or more first frustums 103, and may then be stored in the primitive list in association with their related first tile.” and page 15, lines 32-page 16, line 1, “That is, the rasterizer 105 may access the primitive storage 104, and may obtain the first primitives 102 per (first) tile, for example, using the first primitive list. In particular, for each first tile of the plurality of first tiles, the first primitives 102 selected for said first tile are rasterized by the rasterizer 105, in order to obtain one first rasterized tile 106.”) 7. Glushkov doesn't explicitly disclose but Janus discloses: [[based on a frustum associated with a tile of a display space, performing a frustum query on at least a portion of an acceleration structure]] including a first level of a hierarchy and indicating a graphics object [[in the tile, the frustum query indicating a position of at least a portion of the graphics object relative to the frustum;]] (Janus, Fig. 43, 45; [0346], “As mentioned, bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) are commonly used to improve the efficiency with which operations are performed on graphics primitives and other graphics objects. A BVH is a hierarchical tree structure which is built based on a set of geometric objects. At the top of the tree structure is the root node which encloses all of the geometric objects in a given scene. The individual geometric objects are wrapped in bounding volumes that form the leaf nodes of the tree.” and [0348], “For example, ... one embodiment of the traversal/intersection circuitry 4005 supports configurable queries including queries such as box vs. BVH node (b), sphere vs. BVH node (c), frustum vs. BVH node (d), point vs. BVH node (e).” and [0349], “For example, the general query architecture may be configured to find all intersections with a ray frustum or to find the n-closest intersections.” and [0053], “In various embodiments the system 100 includes one or more processors 102 and one or more graphics processors 108 ...”) [[generating a list of graphics objects in the tile based on the frustum query, each graphics object in the list]] of graphics objects including a corresponding plurality of primitives represented by a second level of the hierarchy of the acceleration structure; and (Janus, Fig. 43, 45; [0346], “As mentioned, bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) are commonly used to improve the efficiency with which operations are performed on graphics primitives and other graphics objects. A BVH is a hierarchical tree structure which is built based on a set of geometric objects. At the top of the tree structure is the root node which encloses all of the geometric objects in a given scene. The individual geometric objects are wrapped in bounding volumes that form the leaf nodes of the tree.” and [0343], “While the hybrid traversal scheme described above uses a two-level BVH hierarchy, the embodiments of the invention described herein may use an arbitrary number of BVH levels with a corresponding change in the outer traversal implementation.” and [0353], “This may include, for example, queries to return all primitives contained within a box/sphere/frustum whenever the ray tracing engine 4610 reaches a BVH leaf.” and [0360], “1. An apparatus comprising: a hierarchical acceleration data structure generator to construct an acceleration data structure comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged nodes associated with a graphics scene; traversal/intersection hardware logic to traverse one or more rays through the acceleration data structure to determine intersections between the one or more rays and one or more primitives within the hierarchical acceleration data structure ...” and [0368], “9. The apparatus of claim 8 wherein the particular types of queries include queries to return all primitives contained within a particular 3D shape when the query processing hardware logic reaches a BVH leaf.”) 8. Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to modify the method of Glushkov to include the disclosure of performing a frustum query on at least a portion of an acceleration structure including a first level of a hierarchy, indicating a graphics object of Janus. The motivation for this modification could have been to organize graphics objects into an acceleration structure so that, when queried, graphics objects can be quickly determined within a tile of the display. This would help with speeding up the rasterization process. 9. As per claim 3, Glushkov in view of Janus discloses: The method of claim 1, further comprising: based on the frustum associated with the tile of the display space, performing a second frustum query on at least a portion of the acceleration structure including a third level of the hierarchy and indicating a portion of the graphics object in the tile; and (Glushkov, page 4, lines 28-31, “... generate one or more second frustums for each second tile; select, for each second tile, second primitives from the acceleration structure, wherein a set of second primitives is selected from each of the one or more second frustums generated for said second tile; ...” and Glushkov, page 6, lines 22-23, “Finally, a 'primitive' may be basic drawing shape, for instance, at least one of a polygon and a triangle.” and Janus, Fig. 43, 45; [0346], “As mentioned, bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) are commonly used to improve the efficiency with which operations are performed on graphics primitives and other graphics objects. A BVH is a hierarchical tree structure which is built based on a set of geometric objects. At the top of the tree structure is the root node which encloses all of the geometric objects in a given scene. The individual geometric objects are wrapped in bounding volumes that form the leaf nodes of the tree.” and Janus, [0343], “While the hybrid traversal scheme described above uses a two-level BVH hierarchy, the embodiments of the invention described herein may use an arbitrary number of BVH levels with a corresponding change in the outer traversal implementation.” and Janus, [0353], “This may include, for example, queries to return all primitives contained within a box/sphere/frustum whenever the ray tracing engine 4610 reaches a BVH leaf.”; Examiner’s note: Fig. 45 below shows at least a third level of hierarchy for the BVH acceleration structure.) PNG media_image1.png 690 801 media_image1.png Greyscale performing a draw call for the portion of the graphics object in the tile based on the second frustum query. (Glushkov, page 17, lines 1-9, “For example, the tile-specific second primitives 111 may be selected from the acceleration structure 101 by the device 100 using the corresponding tile specific one or more second frustums 110, and may then be stored in the second primitive list in association with their related second tile 109. ... The rasterizer 105 of the rendering pipeline may then rasterize the second primitives 111 selected for the one or more second tiles 109, in order to obtain one or more second rasterized tiles 112.” and page 1, line 18, “The rasterization of a plurality of such primitives, may lead to the rendered scene.”) 10. Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to modify the method of claim 1 of Glushkov to include the disclosure of performing a second frustum query on at least a portion of the acceleration structure including a third level of the hierarchy, indicating a portion of the graphics object of Janus. The motivation for this modification could have been to organize graphics objects into an acceleration structure so that, when queried, graphics objects can be quickly determined within a tile of the display. This would help with speeding up the rasterization process. 11. As per claim 4, Glushkov in view of Janus discloses: The method of claim 3, further comprising: generating a list of portions of graphics objects in the tile based on the second frustum query, wherein performing a draw call for the portion of the graphics object in the tile is based on the list of portions of graphics objects in the tile. (Glushkov, page 17, lines 1-13, “For example, the tile-specific second primitives 111 may be selected from the acceleration structure 101 by the device 100 using the corresponding tile specific one or more second frustums 110, and may then be stored in the second primitive list in association with their related second tile 109. ... That is, the rasterizer 105 may access the primitive storage 104, and may obtain the sets of second primitives 111 generated for each second tile 109, for example, using the second primitive list. In particular, for each second tile 109, the one or more sets of second primitives 111 selected for said second tile 109 are rasterized by the rasterizer 105, in order to obtain the one or more second rasterized tiles 112.” and page 1, line 18, “The rasterization of a plurality of such primitives, may lead to the rendered scene.” and page 6, lines 22-23, “Finally, a “primitive” may be basic drawing shape, for instance, at least one of a polygon and a triangle.”) 12. As per claim 5, Glushkov in view of Janus discloses: The method of claim 1, further comprising: generating the frustum associated with the tile of the display space based on a viewport of a scene to be rendered. (Glushkov, page 6, lines 11-13, “Such a frustum may also be referred to as a view frustum or a viewing frustum, and may correspond to a region of space of the scene, e.g., that may appear on a display when the rendered scene is displayed.” and page 4, lines 19-22, “A first aspect of this disclosure provides a device for recursive rasterization, the device being configured to determine a render target comprising a plurality of first tiles; obtain an acceleration structure; obtain one or more first frustums, wherein each first tile of the render target is associated with one first frustum; …”) 13. As per claim 6, Glushkov in view of Janus discloses: The method of claim 5, wherein the frustum associated with the tile of the display space comprises a portion of the viewport in the tile. (Glushkov, page 3, lines 28-30, “In addition to the above, a conventional tile-based architecture (TBA) is commonly used for GPUs to render scenes. This architecture divides a render target into compact sub-render targets (so-called tiles).” and page 6, lines 25-28, “As mentioned above, the device of the first aspect supports the TBA. Thereby, tiled rendering, particularly tiled rasterization, describes the process of subdividing a computer graphics image by a regular grid in optical space and rendering or rasterizing, respectively, each section of the grid, or tile, separately.” and page 6, lines 11-13, “Such a frustum may also be referred to as a view frustum or a viewing frustum, and may correspond to a region of space of the scene, e.g., that may appear on a display when the rendered scene is displayed.” and page 4, lines 19-22, “A first aspect of this disclosure provides a device for recursive rasterization, the device being configured to determine a render target comprising a plurality of first tiles; obtain an acceleration structure; obtain one or more first frustums, wherein each first tile of the render target is associated with one first frustum; ...”) 14. As per claim 7, Glushkov in view of Janus discloses: The method of claim 1, further comprising: based on a second frustum associated with a second tile of the display space, performing a second frustum query on at least a portion of an acceleration structure including the first level of the hierarchy and indicating a second graphics object in the second tile; and (Glushkov, page 4, lines 28-31, “... generate one or more second frustums for each second tile; select, for each second tile, second primitives from the acceleration structure, wherein a set of second primitives is selected from each of the one or more second frustums generated for said second tile; ...” and Glushkov, page 6, lines 11-13, “Such a frustum may also be referred to as a view frustum or a viewing frustum, and may correspond to a region of space of the scene, e.g., that may appear on a display when the rendered scene is displayed.” and Janus, Fig. 43, 45; [0346], “As mentioned, bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) are commonly used to improve the efficiency with which operations are performed on graphics primitives and other graphics objects. A BVH is a hierarchical tree structure which is built based on a set of geometric objects. At the top of the tree structure is the root node which encloses all of the geometric objects in a given scene. The individual geometric objects are wrapped in bounding volumes that form the leaf nodes of the tree.” and Janus, [0343], “While the hybrid traversal scheme described above uses a two-level BVH hierarchy, the embodiments of the invention described herein may use an arbitrary number of BVH levels with a corresponding change in the outer traversal implementation.”) rasterizing the second graphics object in the second tile of the display space based on the second frustum query. (Glushkov, page 17, lines 1-9, “For example, the tile-specific second primitives 111 may be selected from the acceleration structure 101 by the device 100 using the corresponding tile specific one or more second frustums 110, and may then be stored in the second primitive list in association with their related second tile 109. ... The rasterizer 105 of the rendering pipeline may then rasterize the second primitives 111 selected for the one or more second tiles 109, in order to obtain one or more second rasterized tiles 112.”) 15. Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to modify the method of claim 1 of Glushkov to include the disclosure of performing a second frustum query on at least a portion of an acceleration structure including the first level of the hierarchy, indicating a second graphics object of Janus. The motivation for this modification could have been to organize graphics objects into an acceleration structure so that, when queried, graphics objects can be quickly determined within a tile of the display. This would help with speeding up the rasterization process. 16. Claim 8 is similar in scope to claim 1 except for an additional limitation that Glushkov in view of Janus discloses: A processor, comprising: a graphics core associated with a first tile of a display space and configured to: (Glushkov, page 3, lines 30-32, “From a technical point of view, a GPU can work with a lot of such tiles separately, and even almost independently from each other.” and page 7, lines 8-9, “A compute shader may provide high performance execution of general purpose computing tasks, utilizing large numbers of parallel processors on the GPU.”) Claim 8 is also rejected under the same rationale as claim 1, described above. The motivation for this modification is the same as claim 1. 17. Claim 10, which is similar in scope to claims 3 and 8, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. The motivation for this modification is the same as claim 3. 18. Claim 11, which is similar in scope to claims 4 and 8, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. 19. Claim 12, which is similar in scope to claims 5 and 8, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. 20. Claim 13, which is similar in scope to claims 6 and 8, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. 21. Claim 14, which is similar in scope to claims 7 and 8, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. The motivation for this modification is the same as claim 7. 22. As per claim 15, Glushkov in view of Janus discloses: The processor of claim 14, wherein the graphics core is configured to rasterize the graphics object in the first tile concurrently with the second graphics core rasterizing the second graphics object in the second tile. (Glushkov, page 3, lines 30-32, “From a technical point of view, a GPU can work with a lot of such tiles separately, and even almost independently from each other.” and page 7, lines 8-9, “A compute shader may provide high performance execution of general purpose computing tasks, utilizing large numbers of parallel processors on the GPU.” and page 9, lines 17-23, “In an implementation form of the first aspect, the device is configured to: perform the steps of selecting the first primitives, writing the selected first primitives into the primitive storage, and receiving the first rasterized tiles, in parallel for all first tiles or in parallel for groups of first tiles; and/or perform the steps of processing the first rasterized tiles, selecting the second primitives for the second tiles, writing the selected second primitives into the primitive storage, and receiving the second rasterized tiles, in parallel for all second tiles or in parallel for groups of second tiles.”) 23. Claim 16 is similar in scope to claim 1 except for an additional limitation that Glushkov in view of Janus discloses: A processor, comprising: a plurality of graphics cores each associated with a respective tile of a display space and each configured to: (Glushkov, page 3, lines 30-32, “From a technical point of view, a GPU can work with a lot of such tiles separately, and even almost independently from each other.” and page 7, lines 8-9, “A compute shader may provide high performance execution of general purpose computing tasks, utilizing large numbers of parallel processors on the GPU.”) Claim 16 is also rejected under the same rationale as claim 1, described above. The motivation for this modification is the same as claim 1. 24. Claim 18, which is similar in scope to claims 3 and 16, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. The motivation for this modification is the same as claim 3. 25. Claim 19, which is similar in scope to claims 4 and 16, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. 26. Claim 20, which is similar in scope to claims 6 and 16, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. 27. Claims 2, 9, and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Glushkov (WO-2022131949-A1) in view of Janus et al. (US-2020/0211261-A1, hereinafter "Janus"), and further in view of Bourd (US-2024/0249466-A1). 28. As per claim 2, Glushkov in view of Janus discloses: The method of claim 1, wherein the list of graphics objects indicates one or more graphics objects in the tile [[that intersect one or more planes of the frustum.]] (Glushkov, page 15, lines 23-26, “For example, the tile-specific first primitives 102 may be selected from the acceleration structure 101 by the device 100 using the corresponding tile-specific one or more first frustums 103, and may then be stored in the primitive list in association with their related first tile.” and page 15, line 32-page 16, line 1, “That is, the rasterizer 105 may access the primitive storage 104, and may obtain the first primitives 102 per (first) tile, for example, using the first primitive list. In particular, for each first tile of the plurality of first tiles, the first primitives 102 selected for said first tile are rasterized by the rasterizer 105, in order to obtain one first rasterized tile 106.”) 29. Glushkov in view of Janus doesn't explicitly disclose but Bourd discloses: [[The method of claim 1, wherein the list of graphics objects indicates one or more graphics objects in the tile]] that intersect one or more planes of the frustum. (Bourd, [0005], “The apparatus may also render, based on a list of primitives for rendering, all of the plurality of primitives that are associated with all of the set of first-level child nodes that the view frustum intersects.” and [0043], “The geometry culling component 198 may also be configured to render, based on a list of primitives for rendering, all of the plurality of primitives that are associated with all of the set of first-level child nodes that the view frustum intersects.” and [0063], “The view frustum may be obtained by taking a frustum (i.e., a truncation with parallel planes) of a pyramid of vision from the viewpoint or camera, which is an adaptation of a cone of vision for a viewpoint or camera. The shape of the view frustum region may vary depending on what kind of camera is being simulated, but it may be a frustum of a rectangular pyramid. The planes that cut the view frustum that are perpendicular to the viewing direction may be referred to as a near plane and a far plane.” and [0040], “The processing unit 120 may include one or more processors, such as one or more microprocessors, GPUs ...” and [0049], “In some instances, GPUs may render an image using rendering and/or tiled rendering.”) 30. Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to modify the method of claim 1 of Glushkov in view of Janus to include the disclosure of determining graphics objects in a tile that intersect one or more planes of the frustum of Bourd. The motivation for this modification could have been to help construct and organize the acceleration structure by keeping track of which objects intersect a frustum’s planes. The acceleration structure would help with speeding up the rasterization process. 31. Claim 9, which is similar in scope to claims 2 and 8, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. The motivation for this modification is the same as claim 2. 32. Claim 17, which is similar in scope to claims 2 and 16, is thus rejected under the same rationale as described above. The motivation for this modification is the same as claim 2. Conclusion 33. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. These are as follows: Laine et al. (US-2020/0051315-A1), Ramesh Babu et al. (US-2024/0037840-A1), Doyle et al. (US-2024/0046403-A1), Ramesh Babu et al. (US-2024/0070964-A1). 34. Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a). A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action. 35. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to MATTHEW CLOTHIER whose telephone number is (571)272-4667. The examiner can normally be reached Mon-Fri 8:00am-4:00pm. Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Kent Chang can be reached at (571)272-7667. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300. Information regarding the status of published or unpublished applications may be obtained from Patent Center. Unpublished application information in Patent Center is available to registered users. To file and manage patent submissions in Patent Center, visit: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov. Visit https://www.uspto.gov/patents/apply/patent-center for more information about Patent Center and https://www.uspto.gov/patents/docx for information about filing in DOCX format. For additional questions, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000. /MATTHEW CLOTHIER/Examiner, Art Unit 2614 /KENT W CHANG/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2614
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Prosecution Timeline

Jun 02, 2023
Application Filed
May 22, 2025
Non-Final Rejection mailed — §103
Jul 23, 2025
Response Filed
Nov 06, 2025
Final Rejection mailed — §103
Feb 04, 2026
Response after Non-Final Action
May 01, 2026
Notice of Allowance
May 01, 2026
Response after Non-Final Action
May 22, 2026
Response after Non-Final Action

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2-3
Expected OA Rounds
100%
Grant Probability
99%
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2y 1m (~0m remaining)
Median Time to Grant
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