PTAB

IPR2017-01393

Intel Corp v. Alacritech Inc

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Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Freeing Transmit Memory on a Network Interface Device Prior to Receiving an Acknowledgement that Transmit Data has Been Received by a Remote Device
  • Brief Description: The ’104 patent discloses methods and systems for offloading transport layer protocol processing, such as TCP/IP, from a host computer to a network interface device (NID). The purported invention involves the NID sending a response to the host computer indicating data has been transmitted to the network before the NID receives a delivery acknowledgement (ACK) from the remote destination device.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Connery - Claims 1, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 22 are obvious over Connery in view of general knowledge of a Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSA).

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Connery (Patent 5,937,169).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Connery discloses a smart network adapter that offloads TCP segmentation from a host computer, teaching nearly all limitations of the challenged claims. The key disputed feature—sending a response indicating transmission completion before receiving a network ACK—was argued to be an obvious implementation of Connery's teachings. Connery teaches reducing host CPU interrupts to "one per 'large packet'" to improve performance. Petitioner contended a POSA would understand this single interrupt to be a "transmit completion interrupt" sent from the NID to the host immediately after the NID finishes sending the large packet's data to the network. This immediate local signal would necessarily precede the reception of a round-trip ACK from the remote device, which must travel across the network and back. For dependent claims, Petitioner argued Connery teaches receiving ACKs (claim 6) and that using a pointer to a command rather than the command itself was a well-known, obvious design choice (claim 9).
    • Motivation to Combine (for §103 grounds): The motivation was inherent in Connery’s stated goal of reducing host CPU utilization and improving performance. A POSA would be motivated to implement the "one interrupt per large packet" by using an immediate transmit completion interrupt, as this would most effectively notify the host that the NID is ready for the next transmission, thereby maximizing network throughput and achieving Connery’s objectives.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSA would have a high expectation of success because transmit completion interrupts were a common and well-understood mechanism in the art for signaling the completion of a hardware task to a host CPU. Implementing this known technique in Connery's system was presented as a straightforward application of conventional design principles.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Connery and Boucher - Claims 1, 6, 9, 12, and 15 are obvious over Connery in view of Boucher.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Connery (Patent 5,937,169) and Boucher (WO 00/13091).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground was presented as an alternative, arguing that if Connery alone was deemed insufficient to teach the limitation of "maintaining... a Transport Control Protocol (TCP) connection" (claims 1 and 12), then Boucher explicitly supplies this teaching. Boucher discloses an intelligent network interface card that maintains TCP connection state, for example in a Connection Control Block (CCB) cache, to manage fast-path data flows. Petitioner argued that adding Boucher's connection state management to Connery's segmentation offload system would render the limitation obvious.
    • Motivation to Combine (for §103 grounds): A POSA would combine Connery and Boucher because both references address the same technical field of offloading TCP/IP processing to intelligent network hardware to improve host performance. A POSA seeking to enhance Connery's system, particularly for bidirectional data flows, would be motivated to incorporate Boucher’s disclosed CCB cache and connection maintenance techniques to gain the benefit of more efficient data handling.
    • Expectation of Success: The combination was argued to be a predictable integration of complementary technologies. Applying Boucher's known method for maintaining connection state to Connery's offload system would have been well within the skill of a POSA, with a high expectation of successfully creating a more efficient, combined system.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "means for receiving... a command" and other means-plus-function terms (Claim 22): Petitioner asserted that four limitations in claim 22 (recited as "means for receiving," "means for sending," "means for prepending," and "means for sending... an indication") should be treated as means-plus-function terms under 35 U.S.C. § 112, ¶ 6. Petitioner argued that the claims do not recite sufficient structure for performing the claimed functions and that the specification fails to disclose corresponding structure, rendering the terms indefinite.
  • Alternative Position: In the event the terms were found not to be indefinite, Petitioner argued that the "means" in each case is simply Connery's disclosed network interface device, which performs the recited functions. This construction was central to Petitioner's argument that Connery's hardware directly reads on the functions required by the challenged claims.

7. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 22 of Patent 9,055,104 as unpatentable.