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 .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement submitted on 01/12/2026 has been considered and made of record by the examiner.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed on 01/05/2026 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
Applicant’s Argument: Applicant argues that Shakiba does not teach or suggest, using a DFE-decision-corrected signal in sequence estimation, and appears to teach away from such an arrangement, preferring a feed-forward approach.
Examiner’s Response: The Examiner respectfully disagrees. The Examiner asserts that Shakiba discloses that the MLSE decoder performs sequence estimation and data recovery at least partially based on a DFE-decision-corrected signal of the signal processing chain (see Fig. 7B, DFE 760 (the output of the DFE is the DFE decision-corrected signal), MLSD 770 (the output of 770 is the estimated sequence/ recovered data and it is generated based on the output of the DFE 760), paragraphs 0083 and 0085). Therefore, Applicant’s argument is not persuasive.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 15 and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Shakiba (US 2019/0319825).
As to claim 15, Shakiba discloses a system (see Fig. 7B), comprising: a signal processing chain to decode a received signal (see Fig. 7B, the combination of blocks 760, 772, 774, and 776) and recover a transmitted PAM4 symbol (see paragraphs 0073 and 0080-0085); and an MLSE decoder (see Fig. 7B, block 770 and paragraph 0080) to perform sequence estimation and data recovery (see Fig. 7B, signal 778 and paragraphs 0073 and 0085) at least partially based on a 2:2 trellis (see Fig. 7A and paragraphs 0055, 0074, and 0080). Shakiba further discloses that the MLSE decoder performs sequence estimation and data recovery further at least partially based on a DFE-decision-corrected signal of the signal processing chain (see Fig. 7B, DFE 760, signal 764, MLSD 770, paragraphs 0083 and 0085).
As to claim 17, Shakiba discloses that the DFE-decision-corrected signal of the signal processing chain includes one or more DFE tap values (see Fig. 7B, signal 764 and paragraph 0085).
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.
Claims 18 and 19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Shakiba and Zarubinsky et al. (hereinafter, referred to as Zarubinsky) (WO 2023/165703), further in view of Konishi et al. (hereinafter, referred to as Konishi) (US 2021/0384921).
As to claim 18, Shakiba discloses all the subject matters claimed in claim 18, except that the MLSE decoder provides one or more soft decision outputs that comprise likelihood values for respective decoded symbols. Zarubinsky, in the same field of endeavor, discloses that an MLSE decoder may provide hard decision or a soft- decision outputs (see page 18, line 13). It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention was made to modify the teachings of Shakiba, as suggested by Zarubinsky, to preserve confidence information about each bit, which significantly improves performance of the system. Shakiba and Zarubinsky do not expressly disclose that the soft decision outputs comprise likelihood values for respective decoded symbols. Konishi, in the same field of endeavor, discloses a decoding unit, where the decoding unit executes soft decision decoding based on the likelihood values generated by a likelihood generation circuit (see paragraph 0053). It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention was made to modify the teachings of Shakiba and Zarubinsky, as suggested by Konishi, in order to retain reliability information about received data and improve the performance of the decoding process.
As to claim 19, Konishi further discloses that the one or more soft decision outputs indicate reliability of respective decoded symbols to facilitate error correction and channel decoding (see the abstract and Fig. 1, blocks 15, 16, 17, and 18 and paragraphs 0006, 0015, and 0053 soft decisions directly indicate the reliability of decoded symbols).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-14 are allowed.
Claim 20 is 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
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to LEILA MALEK whose telephone number is (571)272-8731. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8:30am-4:30pm.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Chieh Fan can be reached at 571-272-3042. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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LEILA . MALEK
Examiner
Art Unit 2632
/LEILA MALEK/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2632
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