DETAILED ACTION
This Office Action, based on application 18/789,442 filed 30 July 2024, is entered responsive to applicant’s initial filing. Claims 1-20 are currently pending and have been fully considered below.
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 .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 6 February 2026 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Drawings
Drawing Figs. 5 and 6 are objected to due to informalities noted below. The Office will withdraw the objection should the applicant insist on the line shading; however, the non-aesthetic issues should still be addressed. The Office recommends splitting Fig. 6 into Figs. 6A and 6B (along with updating the respective written description) illustrating the pool transformation using different priority policies.
Tables 504, 604, and 606 contain line shading that reduces legibility of the drawings, especially in consideration of reproduction of the drawings where they may be reduced to two-thirds in size. Furthermore, the line shading is not accompanied by any legend
Fig 6 contains the following noted issues:
Table 604 – B38 and B42 are duplicated while B39 and B43 are missing
Table 606 – The range of Group #2 should be “4 FROM B52 TO B55”.
The Office notes the following Standards for Drawings (37 C.F.R. § 1.84):
(k) Scale. The scale to which a drawing is made must be large enough to show the mechanism without crowding when the drawing is reduced in size to two-thirds in reproduction. Indications such as "actual size" or "scale 1/2" on the drawings are not permitted since these lose their meaning with reproduction in a different format.
(l) Character of lines, numbers, and letters. All drawings must be made by a process which will give them satisfactory reproduction characteristics. Every line, number, and letter must be durable, clean, black (except for color drawings), sufficiently dense and dark, and uniformly thick and well-defined. The weight of all lines and letters must be heavy enough to permit adequate reproduction. This requirement applies to all lines however fine, to shading, and to lines representing cut surfaces in sectional views. Lines and strokes of different thicknesses may be used in the same drawing where different thicknesses have a different meaning.
(m) Shading. The use of shading in views is encouraged if it aids in understanding the invention and if it does not reduce legibility. Shading is used to indicate the surface or shape of spherical, cylindrical, and conical elements of an object. Flat parts may also be lightly shaded. Such shading is preferred in the case of parts shown in perspective, but not for cross sections. See paragraph (h)(3) of this section. Spaced lines for shading are preferred. These lines must be thin, as few in number as practicable, and they must contrast with the rest of the drawings. As a substitute for shading, heavy lines on the shade side of objects can be used except where they superimpose on each other or obscure reference characters. Light should come from the upper left corner at an angle of 45°. Surface delineations should preferably be shown by proper shading. Solid black shading areas are not permitted, except when used to represent bar graphs or color.
Corrected drawing sheets in compliance with 37 CFR 1.121(d) are required in reply to the Office action to avoid abandonment of the application. Any amended replacement drawing sheet should include all of the figures appearing on the immediate prior version of the sheet, even if only one figure is being amended. The figure or figure number of an amended drawing should not be labeled as “amended.” If a drawing figure is to be canceled, the appropriate figure must be removed from the replacement sheet, and where necessary, the remaining figures must be renumbered and appropriate changes made to the brief description of the several views of the drawings for consistency. Additional replacement sheets may be necessary to show the renumbering of the remaining figures. Each drawing sheet submitted after the filing date of an application must be labeled in the top margin as either “Replacement Sheet” or “New Sheet” pursuant to 37 CFR 1.121(d). If the changes are not accepted by the examiner, the applicant will be notified and informed of any required corrective action in the next Office action. The objection to the drawings will not be held in abeyance.
Claim Objections
The following claims are objected to due to informalities:
Claims 2-4, 15, and 16: “wherein the operations comprise:” should be “wherein the operations further comprise:”.
Claims 15-19: The preamble of each dependent claim is directed to “The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 14”, while parent Claim 14 is directed to “At least one non-transitory machine-readable storage medium”. As such, the dependent claims should also be directed to “The at least one non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 14” since antecedent basis does not exist for a single medium.
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 3 and 16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Exemplary Claim 3 (and similarly Claim 16) is directed to “determining whether a number of remaining blocks in the highest-priority sequence of consecutive blocks is less than a number of blocks associated with the first selected reset read configuration”. The Office asserts the claim is unclear as follows: (1) How ‘a number of blocks’ is determined, and (2) How an association is being made between ‘a number of blocks’ and ‘the first selected reset read configuration’.
Claim 3 is further limited to “wherein the selected reset read configuration is a first selected reset read configuration”. Parent Claim 1 is limited to “selecting … a reset read configuration for the highest-priority sequence of consecutive blocks”. As such, “a first selected reset read configuration” is “the reset read configuration for the highest-priority sequence of consecutive blocks”. Thus, Claim 3’s determining step may be read as “determining whether a number of remaining blocks in the highest-priority sequence of consecutive blocks is less than a number of blocks associated with the reset read configuration for the highest-priority sequence of consecutive blocks”. The interpretation of the claim is non-sensical as a same block count is always being compared to itself.
The Office believes the intent of the claim is to compare a number of remaining blocks in the highest-priority sequence of consecutive blocks with a number of blocks in a next highest-priority sequence of consecutive blocks. The claim may need another ‘determining’ and ‘selecting’ steps to clarify the intended comparison (e.g. see Claim 4).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-20 are allowed over prior art.
Exemplary Claim 1 (and similarly Claims 14 and 20) are directed to performing a “reset read” (described as “ramp{ing} up one or more wordlines of {a} block in parallel to a predetermined voltage and then discharge the one or more wordlines, which causes memory cells associated with the one or more wordlines to be placed in a transient state” – see ¶[0019] of the originally filed specification) on memory blocks in a particular order or sequence based a priority of memory blocks in a block pool. Claim 1 is further directed to determining the priority of the memory blocks based on “a size of {an} individual sequence of consecutive blocks”, and once the highest priority blocks are determined/selected, determining a subsequence of consecutive blocks among the highest priority blocks and performing the “reset read” on the subsequence of consecutive blocks.
Prior art including BINEFT et al (US PGPub 2019/0066771) is noted for teaching a “reset read” process.
Prior art including HUGHES (US Patent 5,784,582) and JACOBS et al (US Patent 6,799,251) are noted for request selection processing in memories based on priority of the request depending on request length (HUGHES), requests having consecutive addresses (HUGHES), or requests based on data characteristic such as size (JACOBS).
Prior art including REID et al (US Patent 8,531,791), PRINS et al (US PGPub 2016/0118132), and BANG et al (US PGPub 2019/0074053) are noted for teaching memory refresh operations that prioritize refresh operations on a high priority block pool (REID), prioritizing garbage collection on a particular block (PRINS), or for teaching a refresh policy based on a priority level of a refresh area (BANG). The Office concedes that while applicant’s claimed “reset read” may not be the same as a memory refresh operation, both operations are performed to reduce errors in data read from a memory array.
Cited prior art has not been found to anticipate or render obvious the performance of a “reset read” on a determined subsequence of consecutive blocks as limited in Claims 1, 14, and 20. The Office would like to emphasize that while one or more reasons are offered as to why the claims are allowable over the prior art, it is each claim, taken as a whole, including interrelationships and interconnections between various claimed elements which are allowable over the prior art of record and not any individual limitation of a claim.
As allowable subject matter has been indicated, applicant's reply must either comply with all formal requirements or specifically traverse each requirement not complied with. See 37 CFR 1.111(b) and MPEP § 707.07(a).
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ERIC T LOONAN whose telephone number is (571)272-6994. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 8am-5pm.
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/ERIC T LOONAN/Examiner, Art Unit 2137