The Specification is More Helpful thatn Technical Treatises and Prior Art Patents

Nazomi Communications, Inc. v. ARM Holdings, PLC, [2007-1190](February 19, 2008) [SCHALL, Rader, Prost] The Federal Circuit affirmed summary judgment of non-infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,332,215.
BRIEF: The district court issued an order construing the single claim term "instructions,"and based on that construction, Nazomi conceded that ARM’s products do not infringe the ’215 patent, and the district court granted ARM’s motion for summary judgment of non-infringement. The invention claimed in the ’215 patent is a hardware accelerator that converts stack-based Java bytecode instructions into register-based “native” instructions that are executable by a register-based central processing unit (CPU). The district court construed the term "instructions" as "either a stack-based instruction that is to be translated into a register-based instruction, or a register-based instructions [sic] that is input to the CPU pipeline," and that in either case, the court found that the instruction "must be upstream of the decode stage of the CPU pipeline" and "cannot mean the control signals that are the output of the decode stage." The Federal Circuit found that the focus on "instructions" was not quite correct and that it was "registered based native instructions" that was used in the claims. Given the clear, specific meaning attributed to "native instructions" and "register-based instructions" in the ’215 patent, we do not find it particularly helpful to consult the technical treatises and prior art patents on which Nazomi relies. The Federal Circuit concluded that one of ordinary skill in the art, reading the claims of the ’215 patent in light of the written description and prosecution history, would attribute a meaning to the claim term "register-based instructions" that does not encompass those signals.