PTAB

IPR2025-01309

Samsung Electronics America Inc v. Maxell Corp

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Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Power Management for Mobile Terminal Processors
  • Brief Description: The ’417 patent discloses a mobile terminal with a clock controller that changes the processor’s clock frequency to manage power consumption. The frequency is increased for active use (open condition) or specific tasks and decreased for standby (closed condition) to balance processing speed with battery life.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Claims 1-2 and 4-7 are obvious over Belt, Foster, and Norris

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Belt (Patent 5,303,171), Foster (Patent 6,223,293), and Norris (Patent 5,630,148).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Belt, which discloses a laptop computer, teaches the core elements of independent claim 1: a mobile terminal with a processor that can be changed from an open to a closed condition. Belt was also asserted to disclose a clock controller for changing processor frequency to manage power, teaching that a lower clock speed is advantageous when processing speed is not critical. To meet the limitation of changing frequency based on the open/closed state, Petitioner argued it would be obvious to modify Belt’s “suspend mode” (which stops the clock when the lid is closed) with Foster’s superior “idle mode,” which merely slows the clock, thereby improving resume time while still saving power. For the limitation of temporarily increasing frequency for a “specific processing” event while closed, Petitioner pointed to Belt’s Power Management Interrupt (PMI) handler, which forces the CPU to its fastest speed to execute a task before returning to a lower speed.
    • Motivation to Combine: A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would combine Belt and Foster to improve the power management of Belt’s portable computer. Foster’s idle mode was presented as a known, superior alternative to Belt’s suspend mode because it reduced the perceptible performance lag when resuming operation from a closed-lid state. The combination of Belt with Norris was proposed as an obvious design choice to implement Belt’s power management system using processors that require an external clock generator, as taught by Norris.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner asserted a POSITA would have a reasonable expectation of success because all references are in the same field of power management for portable computers, many based on the same Intel 386SL architecture. The proposed modifications were argued to involve only routine skill and known programming techniques, yielding predictable results.

Ground 2: Claim 3 is obvious over Belt, Foster, Norris, and Alberth

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Belt (Patent 5,303,171), Foster (Patent 6,223,293), Norris (Patent 5,630,148), and Alberth (Patent 6,094,565).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground built upon the combination in Ground 1 to further address claim 3, which requires the “specific processing” to be an “address retrieval processing.” Petitioner argued that the combination of Belt and Foster already taught a system that could wake from a low-power, closed-lid state to process an incoming modem call to prevent data loss. Alberth was added to this combination to teach the specific nature of that processing. Alberth disclosed a “smart call indication” (i.e., caller ID) feature for a closeable communication device. This feature involved retrieving the incoming caller’s information and comparing it to a stored phone book (an “address retrieval” process) to provide a distinctive ringtone, thereby informing the user of the caller’s identity without opening the device.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA, having already combined Belt, Foster, and Norris to create a power-managed system capable of handling incoming calls while closed, would be motivated to add desirable user features. Since the base combination did not specify how to process the call, a POSITA would look to analogous art like Alberth. Implementing Alberth’s caller ID feature was presented as a logical next step to increase the device’s usability in the closed position, a key objective shared by both Alberth and the ’417 patent.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner contended that success would be expected because the proposed modification was a straightforward integration of a known feature into a compatible system. The modem and memory components in the Belt/Foster system were argued to be functionally similar to those in Alberth, making the implementation of Alberth’s caller ID logic a matter of routine programming skill with predictable outcomes.

4. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-7 of the ’417 patent as unpatentable.