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 .
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claim 11 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter.
Claim 11 is drawn to a “computer program", per se, therefore, fail(s) to fall within a statutory category of invention.
A claim directed to a computer program itself is non-statutory because it is not:
A process, or
A machine, or
A manufacture, or
A composition of matter.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-10 and 12 are allowed.
The following is an examiner’s statement of reasons for allowance:
Regarding claim 1, the prior art fails to disclose or fairly suggest a method for evaluating a transmission line through reflectometry, comprising the following steps: obtaining a measurement of the temporal impulse response of a reference signal propagated in the line from a point of injection and then backpropagated to a point of measurement, the temporal measurement, called a reflectogram, comprising a plurality of amplitude peaks each corresponding to an impedance discontinuity, searching for a set of local extrema in the reflectogram, determining a total reconstruction of the reflectogram as the sum of pulses each having the shape of the reference signal and the position and the amplitude of said local extrema, for each pair of successive local extrema of indices j and j+1, comparing the total reconstruction with, respectively, a first partial reconstruction of the reflectogram for the local extrema of indices 0 to j and a second partial reconstruction of the reflectogram for the local extrema of indices j+1 to N-1, N being the number of local extrema, to determine whether or not the pulses of indices j and j+1 of the reflectogram have a mutual influence on one another, for a group of pulses of the reflectogram that have a mutual influence on one another, determining an optimized reconstruction of the group of pulses from a partial reconstruction of the pulses of the group so as to modify the abscissas of the pulses of the partial reconstruction in order to minimize an error criterion between the optimized partial reconstruction and the measured reflectogram, comparing the difference between the optimized partial reconstruction and the measured reflectogram with a first error threshold and, if the difference is less than the first error threshold, classifying the impedance discontinuity associated with each pulse of the group of pulses according to its position and its amplitude into the following classes: a soft fault, a short circuit, an open circuit, a load matched to the load of the transmission line, an impedance mismatch between the measurement port and the transmission line.
Regarding claim 12, the prior art fails to disclose or fairly suggest a processor-readable recording medium on which there is recorded a program comprising instructions for carrying out the method according to claim 1 when the program is executed by a processor.
Dependent claims 2-10 are allowed with their base claims.
Any comments considered necessary by applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to THOMAS D ALUNKAL whose telephone number is (571)270-1127. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 9AM-5PM.
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/THOMAS D ALUNKAL/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2686