DETAILED ACTION
Notice to Applicant
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
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.
Claims 1-15 are pending.
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Claim Objections
Claim 10 is objected to because of the following informalities: On line 4 of claim 10, “finger” should be changed to --fingers-- for grammatical purposes. Appropriate correction is required.
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.
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.
Claims 1-7, 10, and 12-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nakai US 2010/0259341 in view of Shibata et al. US 2002/0145361.
As per claims 1-7, 10, and 12-15, Nakai discloses in Fig. 1b and Fig. 7 a duplexer, comprising a transmit filter (e.g. Tx filter 210); and a receive filter (e.g. Rx filter 170), wherein the receive filter includes a double-mode surface acoustic wave (DMS) filter (Paragraph 60; Rx filter 170 comprises a double mode SAW filter of the invention in Fig. 1b.), comprising:
as per claims 1, 14, and 15, a piezoelectric substrate (e.g. piezoelectric substrate 100); a pair of reflectors (e.g. reflectors 6 and 7) disposed on the piezoelectric substrate; and N interdigital transducer tracks (IDT-tracks) (e.g. N=5 tracks 1-5) disposed on the piezoelectric substrate and between the pair of reflectors, and alternately arranged along a longitudinal direction (e.g. horizontal direction), each IDT-track including a pair of comb electrodes with a plurality of fingers (Each of the five tracks 1-5 includes a pair of IDT fingers.), and adjacent fingers having opposite polarities (One set of IDT fingers in each of the five tracks is connected to a signal terminal and another adjacent set of IDT fingers in each of the five tracks is connected to ground, thus necessarily having opposite polarities.), wherein a total number of fingers in each IDT-track is a number greater than or equal to 3 (Paragraph 54; A number of electrode fingers of the tracks 1-5 is several to several hundreds.), and N is an integer greater than or equal to 3 (e.g. N=5);
as per claim 2, wherein N is an odd number greater than or equal to 5 (e.g. N=5);
as per claim 3, wherein among the N IDT-tracks, an X-th IDT-track and an (N+1-X)-th IDT-track have a mirror symmetry relationship with respect to a center IDT-track, where X is an integer greater than or equal to 1, and less than or equal to N, and the center IDT-track is a (N+1)/2-th IDT-track (Abstract; The tracks 1-5 have a symmetrical relationship with respect to track 3, where the symmetrical relationship is a mirror symmetry.);
as per claim 5, wherein each IDT-track includes at least a resonance section and a modulation section (Each of the tracks 1-5 includes a constant width section (i.e. “resonance section”) and a respective at least one electrode finger narrow pitch portion (i.e. “modulation section”) N1-N4.);
as per claim 6, wherein a width of each finger in the resonance section measured in the longitudinal direction is greater than a width of each finger in the modulation section measured in the longitudinal direction (Paragraphs 70-71; Electrode finger narrow pitch portions N1-N4 have a width of 0.96 um, where a width of pitch portions in constant sections is 1.07 or 1.09 um.);
as per claim 7, wherein, within each IDT-track, the width of each finger in the resonance section is 1.05 to 1.15 times the width of each finger in the modulation section (Paragraphs 70-71; Electrode finger narrow pitch portions N1-N4 have a width of 0.96 um, where a width of pitch in constant sections is 1.07 or 1.09 um, which is about 1.11-1.14 times (i.e. necessarily between 1.05-1.15 times) the width of the narrow portions.);
as per claim 12, wherein each of the of the first and the N-th IDT-track includes a resonance section arranged adjacent to one of the reflectors (Each of the first and fifth tracks 1 and 5 respectively includes a constant width section (i.e. “resonance section”) that is disposed adjacent one of the reflectors 6 and 7.), and a modulation section arranged adjacent to an adjacent IDT-track (Each of the first and fifth tracks 1 and 5 respectively includes a “modulation section” that is arranged adjacent tracks 2 and 4 respectively.); and
as per claim 13, wherein each one of the second to the (N-1)-th IDT-track includes two modulation sections and a resonance section between the two modulation sections (Each of the tracks 2-4 includes two modulation sections N1-N4 and a constant width section (i.e. “resonance section”) between corresponding modulation sections.).
However, Nakai does not disclose the total number of fingers in each IDT-track is an odd number.
Shibata et al. discloses in Fig. 1 a surface acoustic wave device, where a total number of electrode fingers of a center IDT 1 therein is 39 and a total number of electrode fingers of the other IDTs 2 and 3 is 23 (Paragraphs 160 and 195 of Shibata et al.). Before the effective filing date, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to have designed each of the IDT tracks of Nakai to have had any number of fingers between several to several hundred, such as for example designing a center track 3 to have 39 fingers and the other tracks 1-2 and 4-5 to have 23 fingers, as being an obvious design consideration of yielding expected results based on the exemplary teachings of Shibata et al.
As an obvious consequence of the modification, the combination would have necessarily included: as per claim 1, the total number of fingers in each IDT track is an odd number (e.g. 23 and 39 are odd); as per claim 4, wherein within a group of IDT-tracks including a center IDT-track and IDT-tracks arranged between the center IDT-track and one of the reflectors, a total number of fingers in an IDT-track is different from a total number of fingers in another IDT-track in the group (In the resultant circuit, a group including tracks 2 and 3 of Nakai have different number of fingers (i.e. Track 2 has 23 fingers and track 3 has 39 fingers.).); and as per claim 10, wherein within a group of IDT-tracks including a center IDT-track and IDT-tracks between the center IDT-track and one of the reflectors, a number of fingers in the resonance section of an IDT-track is different from a number of fingers in the resonance section of another IDT-track in the group (In the resultant circuit, a group including tracks 2 and 3 of Nakai have different number of fingers (i.e. Track 2 has 23 fingers and track 3 has 39 fingers.).).
Claim 8 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over the above combination, as applied to claim 5, and further in view of Takamine US Patent 8,339,221.
As per claim 8, the above combination discloses the DMS filter of claim 5, but does not disclose wherein, within each IDT-track, a number of the fingers in the resonance section is greater than a number of the fingers in the modulation section.
Takamine exemplarily discloses in Fig. 29 an elastic wave filter 11 comprising an IDT electrode 11a which has 42 fingers, where portion A (i.e. “modulation section”) therein has less fingers (i.e. 5) than the remaining portion (i.e. “resonance section”) therein (i.e. 37) (Col. 29 lines 45-48 of Takamine). Before the effective filing date, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to have designed each of the tracks of the combination circuit to have had a smaller number of fingers within the modulation section thereof than the resonance section thereof as being an obvious design consideration of yielding expected results based on the exemplary teachings of Takamine. As an obvious consequence of the modification, the combination would have necessarily included: wherein, within each IDT-track, a number of the fingers in the resonance section is greater than a number of the fingers in the modulation section.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 9 and 11 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
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/RAKESH B PATEL/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2843
