Claim Analysis #1 Carnegie Mellon v Marvel Tech Group

Previous Case Summary:

Last week, I focused on the Carnegie Mellon v Marvell Tech Group case centered around two patents which resulted in a settlement of $750 million dollars. This 7 year long dispute ultimately resulted in Marvell, settling and paying Carnegie Mellon in a royalty free settlement regarding error detection technology.


Patent Summary:

Two patents were involved in this case including 6,201,839 regarding a "Method and Apparatus for Correlation-Sensitive Adaptive Sequence Detection and 6,438,180, for " Soft and Hard Sequence Detection in ISI Memory Channels". For the purpose of this claim analysis, I will be looking at the patent: 6,201,839.


Claim Analysis:
This patent included 11 images as well as 28 total claims all of which can be found here: https://www.google.com/patents/US6201839?dq=6,201,839&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwip_aG7srzLAhUHxWMKHchADQ0Q6AEIHTAA

I focused on the first claim titled:

 1. A method of determining branch metric values for branches of a trellis for a Virterbi-like detector, comprising:

selecting a branch metric function for each of the branches at a certain time index; and

applying each of said selected functions to a plurality of signal samples to determine the metric value corresponding to the branch for which the applied branch metric function was selected, wherein each sample corresponds to a different sampling time instant.

Here, not only must it be selected, but also applied.

This claim also included two sub claims consisting of claims regarding receiving signal samples and branch metric functions:

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising the step of receiving said signal samples, said signal samples having signal-dependent noise, correlated noise, or both signal-dependent and correlated noise associated therewith.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein said branch metric functions for each of the branches are selected from a set of signal-dependent branch metric functions.

Above, it further specifies the step. After reading through this claim, the first portion regarding "branch metric values" appears to consist of the proprietary elements where selecting and applying the functions "to a plurality of signal samples". At first glance, and due to my background in Economics, not hardware, it appears as though this is a narrow claim as the sub claims further specify the "signal dependent noise, correlated noise, or both signal-delendent and correlated noise" in detail.

The abstract of the patent provided further information regarding a summary of the various claims at a high level and I have included it below:

The present invention is directed to a method of determining branch metric values for branches of a trellis for a Viterbi-like detector. The method includes the step of selecting a branch metric function for each of the branches at a certain time index. The method also includes the step of applying the selected function to a plurality of time variant signal samples to determine the metric values.