PTAB

IPR2019-00661

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. v. Maxell Ltd.

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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: PORTABLE MOBILE UNIT
  • Brief Description: The ’140 patent discloses a portable mobile unit designed to alert a user when uplink communication quality degrades. The system generates an alarm when the unit’s uplink signal must be transmitted at its maximum level for a specified duration, even while the downlink signal from the base station is received normally.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1A: Claims 1, 3, and 4 are obvious over Wheatley in view of Suzuki.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Wheatley (Patent 5,469,471) and Suzuki (European Pat. Pub. No. EP0675609).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Wheatley taught the core elements of the challenged claims, including a portable CDMA transceiver that generates a user-facing "audible interference signal" when the unit operates at or near its maximum transmission power limit. This signal, a form of alarm, alerts the user to poor link quality. Petitioner asserted that while Wheatley discloses a "CDMA signal processor," Suzuki supplied the explicit teaching of a conventional "signal demodulator" to perform the inherent function of dividing received signals into communication and control signals for baseband processing.
    • Motivation to Combine: A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would combine Suzuki’s conventional demodulation circuitry with Wheatley’s system. Petitioner contended this would be a simple application of a known technique to a known system to achieve the predictable result of properly processing received CDMA signals.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a high expectation of success, as combining a standard demodulator into a transceiver architecture like Wheatley's was a well-understood and routine practice in the field.

Ground 1B: Claims 1, 3, and 4 are obvious over Wheatley in view of Suzuki and Lindell.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Wheatley (Patent 5,469,471), Suzuki (European Pat. Pub. No. EP0675609), and Lindell (Patent 5,524,275).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground builds upon Ground 1A, with Lindell added to explicitly teach the "predetermined period of time" limitation recited in claims 3 and 4. Petitioner argued that Lindell disclosed generating a warning alarm only after an average RF power level exceeds a threshold for a "suitable time." This time delay prevents alarms based on transient or momentary power spikes.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would incorporate Lindell’s time-delay concept into the Wheatley/Suzuki combination to improve the system's overall quality and reliability. The primary motivation was to reduce the likelihood of false alarms, thereby preventing unnecessary alerts to the user and allowing for more stable communication when passing temporary obstructions.
    • Expectation of Success: Adding a time-delay function, either via software or a simple integrator circuit as suggested by Lindell, was a predictable modification that would have been expected to function as intended without altering the underlying operation of Wheatley's system.

Ground 2: Claims 1, 3, and 4 are obvious over Lomp in view of Bartle.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Lomp (Patent 5,799,010) and Bartle (Patent 5,722,068).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Lomp disclosed a CDMA communication system with subscriber units that contained all the structural elements of claim 1. Lomp taught that its subscriber unit sends an "alarm message" to the base station when its transmit power reaches a maximum value. To the extent this "alarm message" is not a user-facing alarm as required by the claims, Petitioner argued that Bartle supplied the missing teaching. Bartle explicitly disclosed providing a user with an "audible sound" or other warning of imminent communication disconnection. Furthermore, Bartle taught waiting for a condition to persist for a "predetermined amount of time" (e.g., waiting for two consecutive threshold violations) before generating the alarm to reduce errors.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Bartle's user-facing, audible alarm with Lomp's system to achieve the known benefit of directly notifying the user of potential connection degradation. This would provide the user an opportunity to react. A POSITA would also have been motivated to incorporate Bartle's time-delay logic to make Lomp's alarm system more robust and less prone to false positives, a common design goal for such systems.
    • Expectation of Success: The combination represented the predictable integration of a conventional user-notification feature (from Bartle) into a standard mobile communication system (from Lomp), which a POSITA would have expected to work successfully.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • Petitioner argued that the term "an alarm" (recited in claims 1 and 4) should be construed according to its plain and ordinary meaning as "producing sounds or displaying words on a display screen." This construction was asserted to be consistent with the ’140 patent’s specification and figures. The distinction between a user-facing alarm and a system-level message (e.g., an alarm sent to a base station) was central to Petitioner's arguments for why certain prior art, like Lomp, required modification by a secondary reference like Bartle.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requested the institution of an inter partes review and the cancellation of claims 1, 3, and 4 of Patent 6,983,140 as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.