DETAILED ACTION
Notice to Applicant
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 (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) 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.
Claims 1-20 are pending.
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Claim Objections
Claims 1, 10, and 19 are objected to because of the following informalities:
The following changes should be made to improve claim language clarity:
On line 9 of claim 1, insert –linear-- before “second portion”.
On line 2 of claim 10, insert --plurality of-- before “openings”.
On line 2 of claim 19, change “Claims” to --Claim--. Appropriate correction is required.
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.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 1, 2, 10, and 12 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Porta et al. US 2013/0313013 in view of Adachi et al. US 2008/0057299.
As per claims 1, 2, 10, and 12, Porta et al. discloses in Fig. 4 a wiring board comprising:
as per claim 1, a signal line (e.g. transmission line 11) that transmits a signal; and an electroconductive layer (e.g. conductive shielding layer 15 that has a lattice structure) that is disposed to face the signal line, wherein the electroconductive layer includes a first portion (Annotated Fig. 4 below, portion annotated as A) in which a plurality of openings (Annotated Fig. 4 below, openings annotated as B1 and B2) are provided, and a linear second portion (Annotated Fig. 4 below, line annotated as C) that is formed in at least one of the plurality of openings (Annotated Fig. 4 below; The line annotated as C is formed within the openings annotated as B1 and B2.), that has, at one end thereof (Annotated Fig. 4 below, right end of line annotated as C), a connection portion (Annotated Fig. 4 below, connecting line annotated as D) connected to the first portion (Annotated Fig. 4 below; The line annotated as D is connected to a right side of the “first portion” annotated as A), and whose other end is an open end (Annotated Fig. 4 below and Paragraph 51; A left end of the line annotated as C ends at portion 10b which is free from the shielding layer, thus is necessarily “an open end” as it is not connected to any conductor thereof.), wherein the connection portion is disposed in the second portion on a sending side in a transmission direction of a signal through the signal line (Annotated Fig. 4 below; The line annotated as D is directly connected to the line annotated as C at a right side of the transmission line 11 which is a sending side in a left to right transmission direction of a signal through the line 11.), and wherein an angle between a direction along the transmission direction of the signal and an extension direction of the second portion from the connecting portion toward the open end is an acute or obtuse angle (related Fig. 6; An angle between the transmission line 11 and lines 15a and 15b of the lattice structure is 45 degrees (i.e. “acute angle”). Thus, an angle between the line annotated as C which extends toward the left open end thereof and the line 11 when viewing the board in the aerial direction as shown in the annotated Fig. 4 below is an acute angle of 45 degrees.);
as per claim 2, wherein an angle between an extension direction of the signal line along the transmission direction of the signal and the extension direction of the second portion from the connecting portion toward the open end is an acute angle (related Fig. 6; An angle between the transmission line 11 and lines 15a and 15b of the lattice structure is 45 degrees (i.e. “acute angle”). Thus, an angle between the line annotated as C which extends toward the left open end thereof and the line 11 when viewing the board in the aerial direction as shown in the annotated Fig. 4 below is an acute angle of 45 degrees.);
as per claim 10, wherein the second portion includes one or more second portions provided in each of the openings (Annotated Fig. 4 below; The line annotated as C includes a segment within each of the openings annotated as B1 and B2.); and
as per claim 12, wherein the first portion has a grid shape composed of a plurality of linear electroconductive portions (e.g. lines 15a) that are provided parallel to each other and a plurality of other linear electroconductive portions (e.g. lines 15b) that intersect the plurality of linear electroconductive portions and that are provided parallel to each other, and extension directions of the electroconductive portions and the other electroconductive portions differ from an extension direction of the signal line (The lines 15a and 15b extend in a diagonal direction that is different from line 11 which extends in a horizontal direction.).
However, Porta et al. does not disclose the wiring board being a flexible wiring board.
Adachi et al. exemplarily discloses a wiring board that is made of a flexible material (Paragraph 8 of Adachi et al.). Before the effective filing date, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to have replaced a generic material of the wiring board of Porta et al. with a specific flexible material of Adachi et al. as being an obvious art substitution of equivalence with the motivation of providing the benefit of utilizing a material that is excellent in flexing resistance (Paragraph 8 of Adachi et al.). As an obvious consequence of the modification, the combination would have necessarily included the wiring board being a flexible wiring board.
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Claim 15 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over the above combination, as applied to claim 1, and Kawakami et al. US Patent 5,195,238, all taken in combination.
As per claim 15, the above combination discloses the flexible wiring board according to claim 1, but does not disclose a manufacturing method of manufacturing the flexible wiring board according to claim 1, comprising forming the electroconductive layer by screen printing.
However, Kawakami et al. exemplarily discloses in Fig. 1 a printed circuit board comprising a mesh shield layer 10 that is formed by screen printing (Col. 1 lines 40-43 of Kawakami et al.). Before the effective filing date, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of manufacture to have designed the printed circuit board of the combination circuit utilizing any known manufacturing method, such as for example screen printing, as being a well-known obvious design consideration of yielding expected results in manufacturing mesh shield layers based on the exemplary teachings of Kawakami et al.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 3-9, 11, 13-14, and 16-20 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Conclusion
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/RAKESH B PATEL/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2843