T 0649/08 () of 20.6.2012

Summary of Facts and Submissions

I. The applicant lodged an appeal against the decision of the examining division posted 12 November 2007, to refuse the European patent application No. 04258172.8.

II. The examining division held that the application, comprising the claims filed on 19 October 2007, did not meet the requirements of Articles 54 and 56 EPC having regard to the prior art (D1 to D5) cited in the search report.

III. In a communication posted 2 February 2012 summoning the appellant to oral proceedings, the Board indicated that some amendment made to claim 1 might contravene Article 123(2) EPC and that claims 1 and 9 might not meet the requirements of Article 84 EPC.

The Board referred additionally to the following state of the art:

D6 = US 4 847 569 A; and

D7 = GB 2 389 254 A

and informed the appellant of its preliminary opinion that the subject-matter of claims 1, 2 to 4 and 9 would lack novelty having regard to D6 and that D7 might be considered for the assessment of inventive step since it addressed the same problem (cf. page 1, lines 1 to 14; page 3, lines 8 to 17 and page 4, lines 11 to 14) as the present application, namely: providing a phase lock loop system (PLL) for mobile communication systems (cf. paragraph [0002] of the application) wherein a complete desired frequency span is separated into sub-ranges, and wherein the PLL can adapt to the temperature changes (cf. paragraphs [0004], [0006] and [0007]).

IV. With a letter dated 8 June 2012 the appellant informed the Board that their participation to the oral proceedings were not intended, and filed "an argumentation concerning the Decision to refuse a European Patent application of 12 November 2007, and an auxiliary request comprising a set of amended claims for replacing all previous claims".

V. Oral proceedings before the board took place on 20 June 2012, at which the appellant were not represented.

The appellant requested in writing that the decision under appeal be set aside and that a patent be granted on the basis of claims 1 to 10 of the request filed with letter of 19 October 2007 (main request) or on the basis of claims 1 to 10 of the auxiliary request filed with letter of 8 June 2012.

VI. Claim 1 of the main request reads as follows:

"A phase lock loop (115) for providing an output signal having a frequency selected based on comparison of an input signal frequency and a feedback signal frequency, the feedback signal being produced in response to the output signal comprising:

a digital storage (140) to store information indicative of a first frequency and first voltage/current information associated with the first frequency;

an oscillator (150) to provide an oscillator frequency that is used to generate the output frequency of the phase lock loop (115); and

a frequency generator circuit (125) capable of producing at least one control signal based on the first frequency and the first voltage/current information, wherein said oscillator is configured to provide said first frequency in response to said at least one control signal, characterized in that:

the frequency generator circuit (125) is configured to cause said oscillator to adapt the oscillator frequency based on said first frequency in response to a trigger signal by determining a change in said at least one control signal using said digital storage and selectively updating said information relating to said first frequency in the digital storage (140)."

Claim 9 of the main request reads as follows:

"A method for selectively pretuning and updating a phase lock loop, the method characterized by:

storing a plurality of desired frequencies including a first and a second desired frequency to adapt said phase lock loop;

holding at least one actual voltage/current to enable a self-calibration in said phase lock loop when generating said plurality of desired frequencies; and in response to a trigger signal, steering an oscillator associated with said phase lock loop to said first desired frequency of said plurality of desired frequencies and determining a change in at least one control signal based on said stored information relating to said first desired frequency and selectively updating said information relating to said first desired frequency."

Claims 2 to 8 are dependent on claim 1. Claim 10 concerns an apparatus comprising means for performing the steps of claim 9.

VII. Claim 1 of the auxiliary request reads as follows:

"A phase lock loop (115) comprising:

a digital storage (140) to store information indicative of a first frequency and first voltage/current information associated with the first frequency;

an oscillator (150) to provide an oscillator frequency; and

a frequency generator circuit (125) capable of producing at least one control signal based on the first frequency and the first voltage/current information, wherein said oscillator is configured to provide said first frequency in response to said at least one control signal, characterized in that:

the frequency generator circuit (125) is further configured to provide a trigger signal to indicate that information indicative of a second frequency and second voltage/current information associated with the second frequency are to be stored in the digital storage (140), wherein the trigger signal is provided to cause an update of the digital storage (140) from the first frequency to the second frequency."

Claim 9 of the auxiliary request reads as follows:

"A method for selectively pretuning and updating a phase lock loop, the method characterized by:

storing a plurality of frequencies including a first and a second frequency to adapt said phase lock loop;

holding voltage/current information associated with the plurality of frequencies to enable a self-calibration in said phase lock loop when generating said plurality of frequencies; and

in response to a trigger signal, steering an oscillator associated with said phase lock loop from said first frequency to said second frequency based on voltage/current information associated with the second frequency."

Claims 2 to 8 are dependent on claim 1. Claim 10 concerns an apparatus comprising means for performing steps of claim 9.

VIII. The appellant essentially argued as follows:

The decision to refuse the European patent application mistakenly considered the following feature of claim 1 "said oscillator is configured to provide said first frequency in response to said at least one control signal" as being identical to a feature known from D1 (US 5 892 408 A), namely "said frequency generator circuit is configured to provide said first frequency in response to said at least one control signal". The subject-matter of claim 1 was therefore not anticipated by D1.

Further, the newly incorporated feature of "a trigger signal that is provided to cause an update of the digital storage from a first frequency to a second frequency" could neither be found in document D1 nor in any document cited in the search report. Thus any combination of document D1 with the available prior art would not lead to the invention.

IX. The appellant did not comment on the preliminary opinion of the Board concerning the lack of novelty of claims 1 to 4 and 9 in view of D6 or the relevance of document D7.

Reasons for the Decision

1. The appeal is admissible.

2. Amendments (Article 123(2) EPC)

2.1 The following features of claim 1 of the main request

- "input signal frequency"; and

- "the feedback signal being produced in response to the output signal"

could not be found in the original application and constitute an unsupported generalisation of the original content.

2.2 The feature "determining a change in said at least one control signal" (claims 1 and 9 of the main request) was not disclosed in the original application either. According to section [0021] of the published application "the update unit 135 ...may automatically determine whether one or more parameters of the PLL unit 120 have changed to dynamically update the pretune voltage" (cf. also original claims 2 and 3), and in response to the trigger signal the frequency generator sends a control signal to cause the oscillator to adapt the oscillator frequency (cf. e.g. section [0010]). There is no determination if the control signal has changed.

2.3 The original application did not disclose a trigger signal "to cause an update of the digital storage (140) from the first frequency to the second frequency" (claim 1 of the auxiliary request). The application as filed proposed "to dynamically update the pretune voltage" (cf. sections [0009] and [0021] and claims 3 and 6) or to "update the one or more actual valid control voltages/currents" (cf. sections [0011] and [0020] and claims 2 and 5) to "compensate for a change in one or more characteristics of the oscillator" (cf. section [0020]). "After the settling time (parameter), an actual valid (e.g., new) control voltage/current of the oscillator 150 may be converted from analog to digital and stored back into the digital storage 140 under the same address, causing the update" (cf. section [0027]). According to the original application the frequencies are not updated, only their corresponding voltage or current values are.

Claims 1 of the main and auxiliary requests and claim 9 of the main request do therefore appear to infringe Article 123(2) EPC.

3. The expressions voltage/current or voltages/currents found in claims 1 and 9 of the main and auxiliary requests are ambiguous. An oscillator could hardly match a frequency in response to setting values being both a current and a voltage. In a usual PLL-control the desired frequencies are mapped to a voltage or a current control value but not both (cf. paragraph [0026]). The expression "voltage/current" is therefore interpreted in the following as voltage or current.

4. Following this interpretation, the subject-matter of the independent claims of the main and auxiliary requests is not novel (Article 54 EPC) having regard to D6 which discloses:

- a phase lock loop 10 to 20 comprising an oscillator 14 for providing an oscillator output signal having a frequency based on a comparison 12 of a reference signal frequency f ref and a feedback signal frequency, the feedback signal being produced in response to the output signal f out (cf. figure 3);

- the phase lock loop comprising a digital storage 26, 28 to store information related to a plurality of desired frequencies, each frequency being associated with a voltage information held in the digital storage (cf. column 4, lines 22 to 25 and 34 to 45);

- the digital storage 26, 28 together with the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) 22 and an operational amplifier 30 constituting a frequency generator in the sense of the frequency generator circuit 125 of the present application (cf. application as published, section [0019] and figure 1), which is capable of producing a control signal (cf. column 4, lines 17 to 19 and voltage signal output of DAC 22) based on the first frequency and the first voltage information (cf. column 4, lines 20 to 25, column 5, lines 17 to 28 and column 6, lines 46 to 65); and

- the oscillator being configured to provide a first frequency in response to the control signal;

- the frequency generator circuit being configured to cause said oscillator 14 to adapt the oscillator frequency in response to a change in said one control signal (cf. sentence bridging columns 5 and 6).

The frequency adaptation continues as long as the "error output from the phase detector 12 is at a level greater than zero" (cf. column 5, line 62 to column 6, line 8). In response to a negative value at the output of detector 12 the output of operational amplifier 30 changes (Phi DET FLAG) to update the voltage information related to said first frequency in the digital storage (cf. column 5, lines 39 to 47 and column 6, lines 46 to 65).

The output of the amplifier 30 is a trigger signal that enables the phase lock loop circuit of D6 to calibrate or recalibrate the phase lock loop by pretuning the oscillator to each frequency and updating the digital storage (look-up table) 28 with the new voltage values (cf. column 3, lines 13 to 30) to compensate for problems such as aging.

The subject-matter of claims 1, 9 and 10 of the main and auxiliary requests is therefore not new having regard to D6.

5. The feature of a trigger signal "provided to cause an update of the digital storage ... from the first frequency to the second frequency" is known from D6, where the value generated by the frequency generator 26, 28 is incremented until the output of the operational amplifier 30 changes and the last value when the output of the amplifier 30 has changed is stored as an update value in the look-up table.

ORDER

For these reasons it is decided that:

The appeal is dismissed.