PTAB

IPR2018-01474

Apple Inc v. Invt SPE Inc

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Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Cellular Communication System with Improved Channel Quality Feedback
  • Brief Description: The ’587 patent discloses a cellular communication system designed to improve the reliability of channel quality feedback transmitted from a handset to a base station. The system represents a channel quality value as a more significant upper digit and a less significant lower digit, then encodes the upper digit using more bits than the lower digit to make it less susceptible to transmission errors.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness of Claim 3 over Bender in view of Jarvinen

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Bender (a July 2000 publication titled "CDMA/HDR: A Bandwidth-Efficient High-Speed Wireless Data Service for Nomadic Users") and Jarvinen (Patent 6,470,470).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Bender, a printed publication, discloses a CDMA system where a handset measures downlink channel quality as a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) value and reports it to a base station. As shown in Bender’s tables, these SNR values are composed of an upper digit (the whole number component) and a lower digit (the fractional component), which Petitioner asserted is analogous to the ’587 patent’s approach. Petitioner contended that Bender does not explicitly teach how to encode this two-part SNR value for transmission. To supply this element, Petitioner turned to Jarvinen, which teaches a well-known method of Unequal Error Protection (UEP). Jarvinen discloses dividing data into more important and less important classes and applying stronger error correction encoding—using more bits—to the more important data. Petitioner asserted that applying Jarvinen’s UEP method to Bender’s SNR values renders claim 3 obvious, as it requires converting each digit to a code word whose length is proportional to its significance.
    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would combine Bender and Jarvinen to improve the reliability of the channel quality feedback mechanism. Petitioner argued that a POSITA would recognize that an error in Bender's upper SNR digit is far more consequential than an error in the lower digit. Jarvinen provides an express motivation to apply stronger protection to more significant information. Therefore, a POSITA would naturally apply the UEP teachings of Jarvinen to Bender’s system by encoding the more significant upper digit with a longer code word (more bits) to protect it from transmission errors.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner asserted that combining the references would have been straightforward. The modification involves applying a standard, well-understood UEP coding technique to a known data transmission problem. A POSITA would have had a high expectation that this combination would predictably improve the robustness of the system without requiring undue experimentation.

Ground 2: Obviousness of Claim 4 over Bender in view of Piret

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Bender (a July 2000 publication titled "CDMA/HDR: A Bandwidth-Efficient High-Speed Wireless Data Service for Nomadic Users") and Piret (Patent 4,747,104).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground again relied on Bender for its disclosure of a handset transmitting a two-digit SNR value to a base station. To teach the claimed encoding method, Petitioner combined Bender with Piret. Piret discloses another UEP technique where data of varying importance is encoded differently. Specifically, Piret teaches encoding more significant bits into a "proto-code word" with a large minimum code word distance (e.g., six) while encoding less significant bits with a smaller minimum distance (e.g., three). A larger minimum code word distance provides greater error correction and makes the data less susceptible to errors. Petitioner argued this combination teaches claim 4’s limitation of encoding information such that the most significant bit is less susceptible to errors than other bits.
    • Motivation to Combine: The motivation to combine Bender and Piret was argued to be analogous to that for Ground 1. A POSITA seeking to improve the reliability of Bender’s SNR feedback would recognize the disparate importance of the upper and lower digits. Piret provides an explicit solution by teaching that increasing the minimum distance of a code word protects the underlying data. A POSITA would combine these teachings to encode Bender’s more significant upper SNR digit with a larger minimum distance code word, thereby making it more robust against transmission errors, as taught by Piret.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner argued that a POSITA would have a reasonable expectation of success in applying Piret's established encoding scheme to Bender's system. The outcome—increased protection for the more significant digit of the SNR value—would be predictable and achievable using nothing more than ordinary skill in the art.

4. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review (IPR) and cancellation of claims 3 and 4 of the ’587 patent as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.