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 .
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.
Claim 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over “Baliarda” (US 20190288393).
Claim 1: Baliarda discloses a half-wavelength antenna device for a vehicle, the half-wavelength antenna device comprising:
a conductive plate 172 (Fig. 15C) having a feeding part (vertical line connected to 171) and a ground (¶ 63: “ground plane”);
a half-wavelength element 171 vertically installed on the conductive plate, the half-wavelength element being connected to the feeding part (thereby being “active”) but insulated from the ground (by virtue of a vertical gap therebetween, as depicted in Fig. 15C); and
a parasitic element 170 disposed in proximity and parallel to the half-wavelength element but insulated from the ground (by virtue of a horizontal and vertical gap therebetween, as depicted in Fig. 15C).
Baliarda fails to expressly the parasitic element electromagnetically coupled to the half-wavelength element.
However, Baliarda teaches in ¶ 63, “The antenna system in this example is formed by two arms that are, in this specific case, 3D structures, once acting as the active arm (171) and the other one acting as the parasitic arm (170). Here, the arms (170, 171) of the antenna system are presented as a parallelepipeds, but any other structure can be obviously taken instead.”
Baliarda further teaches in abstract, “The two arms are coupled through a region on first and second superconducting arms such that the combined structure forms a small antenna with broadband behavior, multiband behavior or a combination thereof. The coupling between the two radiating arms is obtained via the shape and spatial arrangement thereof, in which at least one portion on each arm is placed in close proximity to each other (e.g., at a distance smaller than 1/10 of the longest free-space operating wavelength) to allow electromagnetic fields in one arm to be transferred to the other through close proximity regions.”
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to use Baliarda’s antenna device such that the parasitic element is electromagnetically coupled to the half-wavelength element, in order to achieve broadband or multiband behavior.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-5 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
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Sone (US 12218442)
Baliarda (US 7315289)
Lindenmeier (US 10418710)
Harano (US 7215289)
Chen (US 6987493)
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/HASAN ISLAM/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2845