DETAILED ACTION
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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 of this title, 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.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over US 20170026022 A1 (Craninckx), in view of US 20090267705 A1 (Morris) and in further view of Şengül, M., 2012. Broadband impedance matching via lossless unsymmetrical lattice networks. AEU-International Journal of Electronics and Communications, 66(1), pp.76-79 (Şengül).
Regarding Claims 1, 10 and 20:
A radio frequency front end circuitry, comprising: transmitter circuitry; receiver circuitry; and isolation circuitry configured to couple the transmitter circuitry and the receiver circuitry to one or more antennas, the isolation circuitry comprising a first impedance tank, a second impedance tank, a third impedance tank, and a fourth impedance tank coupled in a first X-section circuit configuration (Craninckx: Figs. 1-2, a balance network for Electrical Balanced Duplexer (EBD) for a transceiver circuitry and other applications; par. 47-52, the EBD comprises of multiple L-C resonance circuitry, e.g., C2/L2, C4/L3, C5/L4 (each pair is equivalent of impedance tank),……, where each cap is a tunable cap; par. 51, “as shown in FIG. 2, an impedance ladder network is constructed with a series-L in shunt with a series-C, with a shunt-C attached to the end, which is also referred to as an impedance stage of the ladder network”; Furthermore, Morriss: par. 66-71, multiple tunable LC circuits arranged in parallel shunt branches connected to common ground nodes; Figs. 5, 8, 11 and par. 49-60, single and bypassed-double pi networks).
It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention was made to modify Craninckx with various tunable LC circuity configuration as further taught by Morris. The advantage of doing so is to provide a mechanism of tuning a cap in parallel with the inductor, which tunes the inductor self-resonant frequency (Morris: Background and par. 44).
Craninckx does not teach explicitly on a x-section circuity configuration. However, Sengül teaches (Sengül: Figs. 1-3, a matching network with x-section configurations).
It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention was made to modify Craninckx with a x-section circuity configuration as further taught by Sengül. The advantage of doing so is to provide a mechanism to improve upon ladder style matching network of Craninckx’s teaching (Sengül: Introduction).
Regarding Claims 2 and 17, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The communication device of claim 1, wherein the antenna tracker comprises a resistor coupled in parallel to the first L-C resonance circuit and the second L-C resonance circuit, the resistor coupled to a ground (Craninckx: par. 50, “ It can be a valid design choice, within the scope of this disclosure, to add resistive elements to the network by reducing the Q in the reactive components in the network, or to include fixed resistances, implemented e.g. as metal resistors, or by using any other option provided by the technology to implement resistive elements, so as to obtain the desired overall network impedance. For example, a resistor could be added at the end of the last portion if so desired to obtain a useful overall network impedance”).
Regarding Claim 3, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The communication device of claim 1, wherein the antenna tracker comprises an inductor coupled in series with the first L-C resonance circuit and the second L-C resonance circuit (Craninckx: par. 51, “an impedance ladder network is constructed with a series-L in shunt with a series-C, with a shunt-C attached to the end”; Morris: par. 68, “a second inductor, coupled between the first node and a second node”).
Regarding Claim 4, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The communication device of claim 1, wherein the antenna tracker comprises a third L-C resonance circuit coupled in series with the first L-C resonance circuit and the second L-C resonance circuit (Craninckx: Figs. 1-2, a balance network for Electrical Balanced Duplexer (EBD) for a transceiver circuitry and other applications; par. 47-52, the EBD comprises of multiple L-C resonance circuitry, e.g., C2/L2, C4/L3, C5/L4 (each pair is equivalent of impedance tank),……, where each cap is a tunable cap; par. 51, “as shown in FIG. 2, an impedance ladder network is constructed with a series-L in shunt with a series-C, with a shunt-C attached to the end, which is also referred to as an impedance stage of the ladder network”; Morris: Fig. 14 and par. 16 and 61-70).
Regarding Claim 5, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The communication device of claim 4, where the first L-C resonance circuit, the second L-C resonance circuit, and the third L-C resonance circuit each comprises a tunable capacitor coupled in parallel with an inductor (Morris: par. 66, “at least one tunable inductor, and at least one tunable capacitor, in parallel with the inductor, wherein the at least one tunable capacitor tunes the at least one tunable inductor self-resonant frequency).
Regarding Claim 6, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The communication device of claim 1, wherein the first L-C resonance circuit is disposed on a first shunt branch of the antenna tracker, the second L-C resonance circuit disposed on a second shunt branch of the antenna tracker (Craninckx: Figs. 1-2, par. 48-49; Morris: par. 16).
Regarding Claim 7, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The communication device of claim 6, wherein the first shunt branch and the second shunt branch are coupled via a first serial branch and a second serial branch (Craninckx: Figs. 1-2, par. 48-49; Morris: par. 33-35).
Regarding Claim 8, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The communication device of claim 7, wherein a first terminal of the first L-C resonance circuit is coupled to a first terminal of the second L-C resonance circuit via a first node and a second node, the first shunt branch coupled to the first serial branch via the first node and the second shunt branch coupled to the first serial branch via the second node (Craninckx: Figs. 1-2, par. 48-49).
Regarding Claim 9, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The communication device of claim 8, wherein the first serial branch comprises a third L-C resonance circuit, the first terminal of the first L-C resonance circuit coupled to a first terminal of the third L-C resonance circuit via the first node, and the first terminal of the second L-C resonance circuit coupled to a second terminal of the third L-C resonance circuit via the second node (Craninckx: Figs. 1-2, par. 48-51; Morris: par. 16 and 44).
Regarding Claim 11, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The radio frequency front end circuitry of claim 10, wherein the first X-section circuit configuration comprises the first impedance tank coupled to the second impedance tank via a first node, the first impedance tank coupled to the third impedance tank via a second node, the fourth impedance tank coupled to the second impedance tank via a third node, and the fourth impedance tank coupled to the third impedance tank via a fourth node (Sengül: Figs. 1-3, a matching network with x-section configurations, where a x-section network consists of 4 nodes).
Regarding Claim 12, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The radio frequency front end circuitry of claim 11, wherein the isolation circuitry comprises a fifth impedance tank, a sixth impedance tank, a seventh impedance tank, and an eighth impedance tank coupled in a second X-section circuit configuration coupled in parallel with the first X-section circuit configuration (Craninckx “ Figs. 1-2, a cascade network with multiple LC tank circuits; Morris: par. 65” “present invention can be extended to an N-pi topology, where the single series tuning capacitor is in parallel with a series combination of N sections, each with a series inductor and a shunt tunable capacitor”, which implies that sections can be in cascade to form a single isolation network, where Sengül: Figs. 1-3 shows each section can be a x-section configuration).
Regarding Claim 13, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The radio frequency front end circuitry of claim 12, wherein the second X-section circuit configuration comprises the fifth impedance tank coupled to the sixth impedance tank via a fifth node, the fifth impedance tank coupled to the seventh impedance tank via a sixth node, the eighth impedance tank coupled to the sixth impedance tank via a seventh node, and the eighth impedance tank coupled to the seventh impedance tank via an eighth node (Craninckx “ Figs. 1-2, a cascade network with multiple LC tank circuits; Morris: par. 65” “present invention can be extended to an N-pi topology, where the single series tuning capacitor is in parallel with a series combination of N sections, each with a series inductor and a shunt tunable capacitor”, which implies that sections can be in cascade to form a single isolation network, where Sengül: Figs. 1-3 shows each section can be a x-section configuration).
Regarding Claim 14, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The radio frequency front end circuitry of claim 13, wherein the first X-section circuit configuration and the second X-section circuit configuration are coupled via the first node and the third node of the first X-section circuit configuration and the sixth node and the eighth node of the second X-section circuit configuration (Craninckx: “ Figs. 1-2, a cascade network with multiple LC tank circuits; Morris: par. 65” “present invention can be extended to an N-pi topology, where the single series tuning capacitor is in parallel with a series combination of N sections, each with a series inductor and a shunt tunable capacitor”, which implies that sections can be in cascade to form a single isolation network, where Sengül: Figs. 1-3 shows each section can be a x-section configuration).
Regarding Claim 15, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The radio frequency front end circuitry of claim 11, the first X-section circuit configuration is coupled to a first impedance tuner via the second node and to a second impedance tuner via the fourth node (Craninckx: par. 21, “the integrated tunable impedance network is a termination port. In embodiments, the network may be single-ended, i.e. with a single input node, or a differential network, i.e. with two differential input nodes”; Fig. 2, input portion 10, with C1/L1; Sengül: Figs. 1-3, shows each section can be a x-section configuration).
Regarding Claim 16, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The radio frequency front end circuitry of claim 15, wherein the first impedance tuner and the second impedance tuner each comprise a ground coupling (Craninckx: par. 21, “the integrated tunable impedance network is a termination port. In embodiments, the network may be single-ended, i.e. with a single input node, or a differential network, i.e. with two differential input nodes”; Fig. 2, input portion 10, with C1/L1; Sengül: Figs. 1-3, shows each section can be a x-section configuration).
Regarding Claim 18, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The radio frequency front end circuitry of claim 10, wherein the first impedance tank, the second impedance tank, the third impedance tank, or the fourth impedance tank comprises an L-C resonance circuit component (Sengül: Figs. 1-3, shows each section can be a x-section configuration).
Regarding Claim 19, Craninckx as modified further teaches:
The radio frequency front end circuitry of claim 18, wherein the L-C resonance circuit component comprises a tunable capacitor coupled in parallel with an inductor (Craninckx:: Fig. 1-2; Morris: par. 66).
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ZHITONG CHEN whose telephone number is (571) 270-1936. The examiner can normally be reached on M-F 9:30am - 5pm.
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/ZHITONG CHEN/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2649
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