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 .
Claims 1-20 are pending.
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Election/Restrictions
Applicant’s election without traverse of Group I, claims 1-6, in the reply filed on 6/15/26 is acknowledged.
Claims 7-20 are withdrawn from further consideration pursuant to 37 CFR 1.142(b) as being drawn to a nonelected invention, there being no allowable generic or linking claim. Election was made without traverse in the reply filed on 6/15/26.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
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.
Claim(s) 1, 3, 4, and 6 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Bharadwaj, US 10,671,554, (“Bharadwaj”), in view of Reeve et al., US 7,330,927, (“Reeve”).
Regarding claim 1, Bharadwaj teaches “A method for a wide-to-narrow in-link converter between a source router and a destination router of a Network on Chip (NoC), comprising:
receiving a wide flit from the source router (Fig. 2, source router 110 sends 1 wide flit to SerDes 130 (see col. 3, lines 10-18 which discloses that traffic can flow from source router 110 to destination router 120 via SerDes 130, which is the inverse of what is shown in Fig. 2; when traffic flows from source router 110 to destination router 120, all of the arrows (for flits and credits) would be reversed – the remaining discussion below is based on this reversal of the arrows; see also, col. 3, lines 47-62);
converting the wide flit to a plurality of narrow flits (Fig. 2, SerDes 130 converts the 1 wide flit to 4 narrow flits; see col. 3, lines 47-62);
popping the plurality of narrow flits to the destination router (Fig. 2, SerDes 130 transmits the 4 narrow flits to the destination router 120; see col. 3, lines 47-62);
accumulating narrow flit credits received from the destination router (Fig. 2, SerDes 130 receives 4 credits from the destination router 120; see col. 3, lines 47-62); and
returning a wide flit credit to the source router for when a number of the accumulated narrow flit credits is equivalent to the wide flit credit” (Fig. 2, SerDes 130 transmits a credit to the source router 110; see col. 3, lines 47-62).
Bharadwaj does not teach but Reeve teaches “returning a link credit to the source router” (col. 6, lines 19-23, “In response, the link receiving node sends the credit count that was consumed by the packet back to the link source node so that the link source node's credit count for the VL can be refreshed (which permits the sending of a subsequent packet)”) as required by claim 1.
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of this claimed invention to modify Bharadwaj by incorporating the teachings of Reeve so that the link source node's credit count for the VL can be refreshed which permits the sending of a subsequent packet, as suggested by Reeve in col. 6, lines 21-23.
Regarding independent claim 4, this independent claim is a corresponding apparatus claim of the method claim 1 and recites similar subject matter. As such, the rationale behind the above rejection of claim 1 applies with equal force to this independent claim and as further amplified below to highlight the minor differences between the claims.
Regarding independent claim 4, see Bharadwaj, Fig. 2 for a “wide-to-narrow in-link converter” (SerDes 130).
Regarding claims 3 and 6, Bharadwaj teaches “wherein the wide flit credit is set as a shared credit or a dedicated credit based on a virtual channel utilized to pop the plurality of narrow flits” (Fig. 2, the wide flit credit sent to the source router 110 is a dedicated credit and a virtual channel is used to transmit the 4 narrow flits to the destination router, see col. 6, lines 24-37).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2 and 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.
Regarding claims 2 and 5, the prior art of record does not teach or fairly suggest “wherein the returning the link credit to the source router is conducted after a defined number of cycles before all of the narrow flits are popped.”
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. See the abstract of the IEEE reference entitled “Do We Need Wide Flits on Networks-On-Chip?”.
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/WON TAE C KIM/Examiner, Art Unit 2414
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