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 .
In the event a determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102, 103, and 112 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102, 103, and 112) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for a rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon and/or the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
Notice of Claim Interpretation
Claims in this application are not interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) unless otherwise noted in an office action.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) submitted on 18 August 2025 and 27 August 2025 are in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statements are being considered by the examiner.
Drawings
The drawings are objected to as failing to comply with 37 CFR 1.84(p)(5) because they do not include any reference sign mentioned in the description. 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. 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 Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 11-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claims do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter. Claim 11 is directed to an apparatus comprising a smart SSD side and a host side. The broadest reasonable interpretation includes apparatuses consisting of two software programs, one operating on a smart SSD side and one operating on a host side. Under such an interpretation, the apparatus would not include the smart SSD or the host. Thus, the broadest reasonable interpretation of the claims includes software per se embodiments. Since software is not a process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, claim 11 includes non-statutory embodiments and therefore claim 11 is non-statutory. Claims 12-20 do not add any additional limitations to the apparatus that could not be performed by software.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-10 are allowed.
The following is an examiner’s statement of reasons for allowance: the prior art fails to teach “determining a parameter configuration for the number of deployed GC compute units that meets throughput requirements” in conjunction with the other claim limitations, nor would it have been obvious. Zhang et al. (“FPGA-Accelerated Compactions for LSM-based Key-Value Store”) teaches “On the FPGA, we design and implement compaction as a pipeline including three stages on decoding/encoding inputs/outputs, merging data, and managing intermediate data in buffers” (page 226, paragraph 5) but fails to teach the identified claim limitation. Duan et al. (“AegonKV: A High Bandwidth, Low Tail Latency, and Low Storage Cost KV-Separated LSM Store with SmartSSD-based GC Offloading”) teaches “We implement GC logic units on the computational devices of SmartSSD, where we take advantage of SmartSSD native indevice data path capabilities and re-optimize the computation process to achieve more efficient GC performance.” (section 4, paragraph 1) but fails to teach the identified claim limitation.
Any comments considered necessary by applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. Zhang (US 2025/0190417) teaches key value separation. Xue (US 12,411,804) teaches data compaction on an FPGA. Sun et al. ("FPGA-based Compaction Engine for Accelerating LSM-tree Key-Value Stores") teaches key value separation. Zhao (Designing Large-scale Key-value Systems on High-Speed Storage Devices) teaches a valid bitmap for a key value store. Sun et al. ("A storage computing architecture with multiple NDP devices for accelerating compaction performance in LSM-tree based KV stores") teaches offloading compaction tasks to NDP devices. Sun et al. ("Asynchronous Compaction Acceleration Scheme for Near-data Processing-enabled LSM-tree-based KV Stores") teaches a compaction module in near-data processing.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to NATHAN SADLER whose telephone number is (571)270-7699. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday 8am - 5pm.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Reginald Bragdon can be reached at (571)272-4204. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/Nathan Sadler/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2139 24 August 2026
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