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 .
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 08/25/2026 has been entered.
Response to Arguments
Rejections under 35 USC 112(b): Applicant has amended the claims accordingly and the rejections are withdrawn.
Rejections under 35 USC 102
Applicant’s Argument: Applicant argues claims 1-2, 5-6, 9-10, 16-17, 20-21, 24-25 are allowable.
Examiner’s Response: Applicant's arguments filed 08/25/2026 have been fully considered. Examiner notes that claim 1, 10, and 16 are allowed.
Applicant provides no argument regarding claim 25 which is not amended in the same way as claim 1, thus the rejection are maintained as the prior art teaches every limitation of claim 25.
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) 25 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by He et al. (“He”) (WO 2020228126 A1, citing from provided English translation).
Regarding claim 25, He teaches:
A data transmission apparatus, wherein the apparatus comprises: a non-transitory memory storing instructions; and a processor coupled to the non-transitory memory; wherein the instructions, when executed by the processor, cause the apparatus to be configured [Figure 2, ¶0241] to: receive second data [¶0153, chip 1 sends second data stream to chip 3], wherein the second data is data produced by coding first data by using a second forward error correction (FEC) code [¶0137 Figure 2, 202 “The chip 1 encodes the first data stream at least once to obtain a second data stream; wherein, the second data stream is encoded using at least the first FEC code type and the second FEC code type The cascaded FEC code stream””], and the first data is produced through coding data using a first FEC code [¶0131, Figure 2, 201, “Chip 1 receives a first data stream sent by chip 2; the first data stream is a data stream encoded with a first forward error correction FEC code pattern.”]; and decode the second data based on the second FEC code, to produce decoded data [¶0153].
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claim(s) 26-28 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over He et al. (“He”) (WO 2020228126 A1, citing from provided English translation) in view of Li et al. (“Li”) (WO 2016015288 A1).
Regarding claim 26, He teaches:
The apparatus according to claim 25.
He teaches decoding but not soft decision.
Li teaches:
wherein the instructions, when executed by the processor, further cause the apparatus to be configured to: perform soft-decision decoding on the second data based on the second FEC code [page 11-12 “ S203. Perform soft decision decoding on each codeword according to all test sequences generated for each codeword, to obtain at least one hard output result of each codeword.”].
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to implement soft decoding as this improves the performance of the transmission system higher than hard decision see page 1-2.
Regarding claim 27, He-Li teaches:
The apparatus according to claim 26, wherein the instructions, when executed by the processor, further cause the apparatus to be configured to:
calculate a confidence of each bit in a received codeword based on received quantized soft- decision information to produce a confidence sequence [Li “S203, soft decision decoding “The soft information of each codeword refers to the soft information of each bit of each codeword, including the confidence of the value,” page 11-14];
select M least reliable bit locations from the confidence sequence, and in the M least reliable bit locations, successively attempting to perform bitwise inversion on all combinations of 0, 1, 2, ..., and N (N
PNG
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11
8
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Greyscale
M) bit locations to produce a plurality of test codewords [Li page 11-14 “The core idea of the above soft decision BCH algorithm is to try to estimate and correct codeword errors through a limited amount of test error patterns. […] the absolute value of the soft information of a certain bit can indicate the reliability of the bit, and the smaller the absolute value, the less reliable the value of the bit is, and the probability of being the wrong bit […] Therefore, for a codeword, first select the P bits with the smallest absolute value of the soft information on the codeword, and consider the error of the codeword. It is most likely to appear in the P positions (P is an integer greater than zero, and the value of P can be set as needed, which is not limited here). Then, 2 .sup.P test sequences (Test Sequence, TS) are constructed based on the P positions.” See example where number of unreliable bits is P=2 figure 4, these bits are flipped to produce all combinations 2 bits, all combinations of bits are inverted to produce test codewords];
perform hard-decision decoding error correction on each of the plurality of test codewords to produce a plurality of corrected test codewords [ Li page 11-14 “S203. Perform soft decision decoding on each codeword according to all test sequences generated for each codeword, to obtain at least one hard output result of each codeword.”]; calculate Euclidean distances between the confidence sequence and the plurality of corrected test codewords [Li page 11-14 “First, obtaining an Euclidean distance between the hard-coded result of the codeword and the soft information of the codeword, which may be based on the value of each bit of each hard output result of the codeword”]; and select a corrected test codeword from the plurality of corrected test codewords corresponding to a smallest distance as a final corrected codeword output [Li page 11-14 “According to the above algorithm, K Euclidean distances can be obtained according to the κ hard output results, and then the hard output result corresponding to the smallest Euclidean distance is selected as the optimal hard output result as the first decoding result” see rationale for combination as in claim 11 for each limitation as these are part of the soft-decision process in the modification of claim 26].
Regarding claim 28, He-Li teaches: the apparatus according to claim 27.
He teaches decoding but not hard decoding when there are no errors.
Li teaches wherein the instructions, when executed by the processor, further cause the apparatus to be configured to: if there is no correctable codeword in the plurality of test codewords, use a hard-decision result corresponding to the received codeword as an output codeword [Li page 11-15 “S211 The total number of codewords of the decoding result of S204, that is, whether the hard decision decoding is not error. For example, if the decoding result of S204 is 256 code words and the error is 0, it is confirmed that all 256 code words are correctly decoded and can be jumped out […] after performing at least one soft decision decoding on multiple codewords, determining whether the decoding result of the soft decision decoding meets the switching condition of switching to hard decision decoding” thus when there are no correctable code words just use the hard decoding].
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to implement hard decoding in this scenario to avoid too much power consumption dedicated to soft decoding see Li page 1-2.
Claim(s) 29-30 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over He et al. (“He”) (WO 2020228126 A1, citing from provided English translation) in view of Landau et al. (“Landau”) (US 20190044839 A1).
Regarding claim 29, He teaches:
The apparatus according to claim 25.
He teaches decoding but not re-coding.
Landau teaches wherein the instructions, when executed by the processor, further cause the apparatus to be configured to: re-code the decoded data based on a third FEC code to produce re-coded data; and transmit the re-coded data [¶0047, data in 66b/64b received and decoded, then re-encode outgoing data with 66b/64b encoding].
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to specify re-encoding after decoding as in Landau in order that incoming and outgoing bit streams may be error corrected without casing variable delay ¶0028.
Regarding claim 30, He teaches:
The apparatus according to claim 29, wherein the third FEC code is the second FEC code [Landau ¶0047 encoding is consistently 66b/64b Reed-Solomon see rationale for combination as in claim 29].
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-24 allowed.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JAY L. VOGEL whose telephone number is (303)297-4322. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8AM-4:30 PM MT.
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/JAY L VOGEL/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2478
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