Invalidity Search
Semiconductor
Invalidity Search Report for US7599231B2
This report provides the results of a comprehensive worldwide prior art search relating to U.S. Patent No. 7,599,231 B2, titled "ADAPTIVE REGULATOR FOR IDLE STATE IN A CHARGE PUMP CIRCUIT OF A MEMORY DEVICE," originally assigned to Atmel Corporation (current assignee: Crestone IP Management, LLC). The search was conducted to identify prior art references relevant to all claims (1-19) of the subject patent, including patent documents and publicly available technical disclosures worldwide.
The purpose of this search is to locate potentially relevant prior art that may impact the novelty and/or inventive step of the claimed invention, which is directed to an adaptive voltage generator that holds a memory read/modify line at a predetermined "idle" voltage substantially equal to the read voltage before and while switching between read and modify (program/erase) operations — thereby suppressing charge-sharing and supply-line switching disturbances during read-while-write — and then ramps the modify line to the high program voltage and discharges it before switching back.
The search covered U.S., European, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and PCT patent literature together with IEEE/academic non-patent literature, using classification codes (G11C16/30, G11C16/12, G11C16/06, G11C16/08, G11C5/145) and multilingual keyword matrices. All references admitted in the subject patent's Background and all references cited during prosecution were excluded under a §325(d)-conscious strategy. The Critical Date was fixed at October 11, 2006 (U.S. filing date; no earlier priority claimed), and the public-availability/priority date of every candidate was independently verified against first-source records. One highly on-point candidate (a Korean-priority document disclosing use of the word-line read voltage as an initial voltage before program ramp-up) was verified to post-date the Critical Date by one day and was accordingly excluded as ineligible.
Four Most Relevant References (D1-D4) and four Additional References were identified. No single reference discloses every element of any independent claim; accordingly, no claim is anticipated (Category X). The invalidity theory is therefore based on obviousness (Category Y), supported by verbatim, precisely-located disclosures mapped element-by-element in the claim charts. Claims that could not be tied to an explicit prior-art disclosure are transparently marked Category A.
The report (approx. 17 pages) includes: full subject-patent bibliographic and search-strategy information; a Most Relevant / Additional References table with X/Y/A categorization; a full Claim 1-19 Relevancy Matrix; detailed claim charts for all three independent claims (1, 6, 12) and every dependent claim, each quoting the prior-art text at its exact location (claim number, figure, section/paragraph); and a complete search-history appendix (multilingual keyword sets, Boolean/proximity queries, and databases).
