DETAILED ACTION
This office action is in response to Application No. 18/565,473, filed on 29 November 2023. Claims 1-17 are pending.
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Objections
Claims 1-17 are objected to because of the following informalities: in claims 1, and 15-17, “fallowing” should be “following”. Appropriate correction is required.
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.
Claims 1-17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to abstract mental processes without significantly more. The claim(s) recite(s) handling register transfer level (RTL) code, comprising steps of determining statement blocks to be encapsulated, traversing each statement block in a module, determining whether the module has a black box signal that is of a signal type not supported by an RTL segmentation tool, and: 1) switching to a parent module if there is a black box signal as an external port, 2) replacing the statement blocks with a module that clusters blocks with the black box signal if statement blocks have a black box signal, and 3) extracting port information of the statement blocks and encapsulating the statement block to be a second module based on the extracted port information, which is a code analysis and modification process that could be performed by an engineer in the mind or with pen and paper. Specifically, an engineer reading or thinking about RTL code, noting the modules, statement blocks, and black box signals, and thinking about or rewriting the RTL code in the manner above literally satisfies the claim. See also Synopsys, Inc. v. Mentor Graphics Corp., 120 U.S.P.Q.2d 1473, 1481.
Claims 2-12 recites an additional code analysis and modification mental process comprising mental steps that could be performed by an engineer in the mind or with pen and paper, similarly to the mental process of claim 1: reading the design code, generating a syntax instance tree to traverse the instances, determining whether each statement block in a module has a black box signal if the external port signal does not comprise a black box signal, establishing a FIFO queue that stores information for characterizing black box signal attributes, traversing the queue information and, for each piece of queue information, merging each statement block that includes the information according to pairwise statement items to replace the pairwise statement items, generating prompt information for merging segmentation boundaries if the statement items are segmentation boundaries, storing, in a FILO stack, a record for each merging operation including an object, action, and port information, and popping records from the stack to restore the original design code logic. Claim 13 recites the additional step of marking the statement block to be encapsulated after it has been encapsulated, which could be performed manually by an engineer with pen and paper. Claim 14 recites the additional mental step of generating second prompt information for characterizing moving the segmentation boundary to an upper module, which is similar to the mental steps of claims 1-12 above that could be performed by an engineer in the mind or with pen and paper. Claims 15-17 are apparatuses, electronic devices, and computer storage media for performing the method of claim 1, which at best are directed to generic computer implementation of the abstract mental process.
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because the only recited limitations other than the abstract idea itself are elements of generic computer implementation, such as ‘tool’, ‘memory’, ‘data structure’, ‘processor’, etc., and generic computer implementation does not qualify as a patentable integration of the abstract idea into a practical application. For the same reasons, the claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because generic computer implementation does not qualify as ‘significantly more’.
Conclusion
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3 October 2026
/ARIC LIN/ Examiner, Art Unit 2851
