Sprint Spectrum L.P. v. General Access Solutions, Ltd.

CourtCourt of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
DecidedMay 13, 2020
Docket19-1855
StatusUnpublished

This text of Sprint Spectrum L.P. v. General Access Solutions, Ltd. (Sprint Spectrum L.P. v. General Access Solutions, Ltd.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Sprint Spectrum L.P. v. General Access Solutions, Ltd., (Fed. Cir. 2020).

Opinion

Case: 19-1855 Document: 45 Page: 1 Filed: 05/13/2020

NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.

United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ______________________

SPRINT SPECTRUM L.P., Appellant

v.

GENERAL ACCESS SOLUTIONS, LTD., Appellee ______________________

2019-1855 ______________________

Appeal from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board in No. IPR2017- 01889. ______________________

Decided: May 13, 2020 ______________________

BRIAN DAVID SCHMALZBACH, McGuireWoods LLP, Richmond, VA, for appellant. Also represented by DAVID EVAN FINKELSON.

GLEN E. SUMMERS, Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP, Denver, CO, for appellee. Also represented by JOHN HUGHES, NOSSON KNOBLOCH, DANIEL TAYLOR. ______________________

Before CHEN, LINN, and STOLL, Circuit Judges. Case: 19-1855 Document: 45 Page: 2 Filed: 05/13/2020

STOLL, Circuit Judge. Sprint Spectrum L.P. appeals the final written decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board declining to hold cer- tain claims of U.S. Patent No. 7,230,931 unpatentable on anticipation and obviousness grounds. Sprint specifically challenges the Board’s construction of a claim term that appears in most of the challenged claims. Sprint also chal- lenges the Board’s determinations relating to the scope of Sprint’s reply and the scope and content of the asserted prior art. Because we agree that the Board erred in con- struing the claim term at issue, we vacate the Board’s de- cision as to the applicable claims and remand for consideration of certain grounds under the proper claim construction. We affirm the Board’s decision in all other respects. BACKGROUND I The ’931 patent is directed to a wireless data commu- nication system that selectively and dynamically directs bandwidth to specific subscribers within a service area. The disclosed system applies a known technique called time division duplexing (TDD), which uses a single fre- quency for bidirectional communication by designating separate and distinct periods of time for the transmittal and receipt of data. TDD systems may employ “frames” to structure the transmittal of downlink data and receipt of uplink data over a short period of time (e.g., 2 millisec- onds). The improvement disclosed in the ’931 patent relates to these TDD frames. Specifically, the ’931 patent discloses sending a broadcast signal to all subscribers within a ser- vice area at the start of each frame, followed by a series of directed signals or “beams” sent to and received from se- lected subscribers over the remainder of each frame. The broadcast signal at the start of each frame includes Case: 19-1855 Document: 45 Page: 3 Filed: 05/13/2020

SPRINT SPECTRUM L.P. v. GEN. ACCESS SOLS., LTD. 3

instructions that assign the forthcoming beams to the se- lected subscribers. Through this approach, the downlink and uplink bandwidth of each frame can be dynamically allocated to various subscribers in a nonuniform fashion, thereby improving performance as compared to other ways of allocating bandwidth, such as “equal duration round robin polling” or “dynamic weighted polling . . . based on the throughput per cell.” ’931 patent col. 28 ll. 44–50. Claims 2, 11, and 20 and the claims that depend from them are at issue on appeal. Claim 2, which depends from claim 1, is illustrative: 1. For use in a wireless access network comprising a plurality of base stations, each of said plurality of base stations capable of bidirectional time division duplex (TDD) communication with wireless access devices disposed at a plurality of subscriber prem- ises in an associated cell site of said wireless access network, a transceiver associated with a first of said plurality of base stations comprising: transmit path circuitry associated with a beam forming network capable of transmitting directed scanning beam signals each directed to substan- tially only wireless access devices within a differ- ent one of a plurality of sectors of a cell site associated with said first base station, wherein said transmit path circuitry transmits, at a start of a TDD frame, a broad- cast beam signal to wireless access devices within more than one of said sectors, the broad- cast beam signal comprising a start of frame field, and subsequently transmits, in a downlink portion of said TDD frame, first downlink data traffic to substantially only wireless access devices Case: 19-1855 Document: 45 Page: 4 Filed: 05/13/2020

within one of said sectors using one of said di- rected scanning beam signals. 2. The transceiver as set forth in claim 1 wherein said broadcast beam signal further comprises a first beam map containing scanning beam infor- mation usable by said wireless access devices to de- tect said directed scanning beam signals. Id. at col. 30 ll. 31–57 (emphasis added to disputed claim limitation). Dependent claims 28 and 29 are also at issue on appeal, but do not depend from claims 2, 11, or 20. Claim 28 is illustrative: 28. The transceiver as set forth in claim 1 wherein said transmit path circuitry transmits, in said downlink portion of said TDD frame, second down- link data traffic to substantially only wireless ac- cess devices within an other of said sectors using an other of said directed scanning beam signals. Id. at col. 33 ll. 4–9. II In July 2017, Sprint petitioned for inter partes review of claims 1–29 of the ’931 patent. The Board instituted trial of the challenged claims on five grounds of unpatentabil- ity. 1 The instituted grounds included anticipation of cer- tain claims by Vornefeld 2 and various obviousness

1 The Board initially declined to institute trial for claims 2, 11, and 20, but added those claims to the proceed- ings following SAS Institute, Inc. v. Iancu, 138 S. Ct. 1348 (2018). 2 Ulrich Vornefeld, et al., SDMA Techniques for Wireless ATM, IEEE COMMC’NS MAGAZINE, Nov. 1999, at 52. Case: 19-1855 Document: 45 Page: 5 Filed: 05/13/2020

SPRINT SPECTRUM L.P. v. GEN. ACCESS SOLS., LTD. 5

combinations of Vornefeld, Ahy, 3 Andersson, 4 and New- man. 5 During the proceedings, patent owner General Ac- cess Solutions (GAS) conceded the unpatentability of independent claims 1, 10, and 19, thereby shifting the fo- cus of the Board’s unpatentability analysis to claims 2, 11, and 20. Following oral argument, the Board authorized supplemental briefing on the construction of the term “beam map” as recited in claims 2, 11, and 20. Beyond accepting GAS’s surrender of claims 1, 10, and 19, the Board declined to hold any of the other chal- lenged claims unpatentable in its final written decision. See Sprint Spectrum L.P. v. Gen. Access Sols., Ltd., No. IPR2017-01889, 2019 WL 1096544, at *13 (P.T.A.B. Mar. 7, 2019) (Decision). Applying the broadest reasonable interpretation standard, the Board first construed the term “a first beam map” as “scheduling information for one or more beams.” Id. at *5. The Board then construed the phrase “a first beam map containing scanning beam infor- mation usable by said wireless access devices to detect said directed scanning beam signals,” recited in claims 2, 11, and 20, 6 as “scheduling information for one or more beams

3 U.S. Patent No. 7,366,133. We recognize, as the Board did, that the first named inventor’s surname is Majidi-Ahy. We use the shorthand “Ahy” for consistency with the Board’s decision. 4 U.S. Patent No. 6,470,177. 5 U.S. Patent No. 5,684,491. 6 The language of claim 20 varies slightly from claims 2 and 11, reciting “a first beam map containing scanning beam information usable by said wireless access devices to receive said first directed scanning beam signal.” ’931 patent col. 32 ll. 35–39 (emphases added). Neither the Board nor the parties identified any effect of this slight var- iation, so we do not analyze claim 20 separately for the pur- pose of our review.

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