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 .
Claims 1-20 are presented for examination.
Priority
Acknowledgment is made of applicant's claim for foreign priority under 35 U.S.C. 119(a)-(d) which papers have been placed of record in the file.
Information Disclosure Statement
The references listed in the information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted have been considered. The submission complies with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.9 /. Form PTO-1449 is signed and attached hereto.
Specification
The specification is accepted.
Drawings
The formal drawings are accepted.
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 1-20 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 pre-AIA the applicant regards as the invention.
Claim 1 recites the limitation “wherein the at least one media interface device is further configured to perform an operation offloaded from the host interface device and perform serial communication with the host interface device” however an operation offloaded of what exactly is being referred to here? what is offloaded or moved or transferred? Further the claim does not particularly point out or does not specify how the operation offloaded and the serial communication are carried out or performed and the interconnections between the operation offloaded and serial communication are extremely confusing and for the most part not detailed or mentioned in the claim. It is difficult to translate the claim and follow what processes are taking place. Independent claims 10 and 16 are rejected for similar reasons and require corrections as well. Respective dependent claims are rejected at least based on dependency. Applicant is encouraged to review all claims and make corrections as needed to clarify claim language. Corrections are requested.
Conclusion
That art is not used against claims is not an indication that the claims are allowable. The 112 problems cause a great deal of confusion and uncertainty as to the proper interpretation of the limitation of the claims. It is difficult for the examiner to ascertain what the applicant feels is the claimed invention.
The scope of the claims is unclear as discussed above. As a result, a meaningful formulation of art rejections cannot be done at this time. See MPEP 2173.06 II, 2nd paragraph:
... where there is a great deal of confusion and uncertainty as to the proper interpretation of the limitations of a claim, it would not be proper to reject such a claim on the basis of prior art.... a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 103 should not be based on considerable speculation about the meaning of terms employed in a claim or assumptions that must be made as to the scope of the claims.
See also Ex Parte Timothy J.O. Catlin and Kevin T. Rowney, the appeal of 09/167,315, Appeal No. 2007-3072, decided Feb. 3, 2009, page 12:
... A rejection of a claim, which is so indefinite that "considerable speculation as to meaning of the terms employed and assumptions as to the scope of such claims" is needed, is likely imprudent. See In re Steele, 305 F.2d 859, 862 (CCPA 1962) (holding that the examiner and the board were wrong in relying on what at best were speculative assumptions as to the meaning of the claims and basing a rejection under 35 U.S.C. §103 thereon.)...
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
The prior arts of record are cited in PTO-892 but will not be applied at this point. The Examiner has cited prior art for Applicants review, particularly Klein et al. (U.S. PN: 11,481,118) “managing the data path between the host system 102 and storage media 124. In other words, the firmware 302 may translate commands or requests for data received from the host system 102 to enable access of the storage media 124. As shown in FIG. 3, the firmware 302 includes a host interface driver 308 to implement a host command handler 310 on the host side and a media interface driver 312 to implement media command manager 314 on the storage media side. As shown in FIG. 3, host input/output commands 316 (host I/Os 316) for data 318 (e.g., data corresponding to a write command) are received by the host command handler 310 and sent to an I/O scheduler of a Flash translation layer 320 (FTL 320) of the storage controller 126. The FTL 320 and/or I/O scheduler may process and schedule the host I/Os 316, which may then be performed as corresponding media input/output commands 322 (media I/Os 322) for storage media access through the media command manager 314. The FTL 320 may manage command processing (e.g., host I/O 316 translation and scheduling) to facilitate movement of host system data 318 within a storage system 114 and/or through a storage controller 126, such as to storage media 124. As shown in FIG. 3, in the context of writing host data to storage media, the FTL 320 processes host I/Os 316 to manage or facilitate movement of the data 318 from the host interface 206 through the data path to the media interface 208, where the data 318 is programmed to the NAND flash devices 204. To do so, the FTL 320 or firmware 302 may manage various components of the hardware 304 to facilitate movement of the data 318 from one component to a next component. For example, the firmware 302 may cause hardware 304 to fetch or move the data 318 from the host interface 206 to the write buffers 132, provide the data 318 (e.g., through transfer or copy) to the RAID encoder 134, and/or provide the data 318 to the ECC encoder 220 for encoding. The firmware 302 may also cause the hardware 304 send the data 318 or ECC-encoded data 324 to the media interface 208 for writing or programming to the NAND flash devices 204. In various aspects, the media write manager 130 may interact with the write buffers 132, RAID encoder 134, firmware 302, or other components of the hardware 304 to implement aspects of storage media programming with adaptive write buffer release. In some cases, the media write manager 130 monitors the RAID encoder 134 for an indication that computation of parity information for the data 318 (e.g., data of one host write command) is complete. Based on completion of the parity information computation and a copy of the data being storing to another internal buffer (e.g., ECC buffer), the write buffer 130 generates an interrupt to the firmware 302 to cause release of the write buffer 132 storing the data 318 (e.g., data of one host write command) By so doing, the write buffer 132 is freed and may be reused for data 318 of a next write command of the host. This may also enable a storage drive to be implemented with fewer or smaller write buffers without affecting write throughput of the storage drive. Prior art rejections will be on hold until and unless clarification is made. The Applicant or his council is invited to contact the Examiner if additional explanation or clarification is required and to advance prosecution.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Esaw T. Abraham whose telephone number is (571) 272-3812. The examiner can normally be reached on M-F 8am-4PM.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner'ssupervisor, Albert DeCady can be reached on (571) 272-3819. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is (703) 872-9306.
Information regarding the status of an application may be obtained from the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAIR or Public PAIR. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://pair-direct.uspto.gov. Should you have questions on access to the Private PAIR system, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative or access to the automated information system, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.
/ESAW T ABRAHAM/Primary Examiner,
Art Unit 2112