In re Translogic Technology, Inc.

During ongoing patent-infringement litigation in which Translogic (plaintiff) ultimately won $86.5 million and a permanent injunction against Hitachi (defendant) for infringing its '666 patent covering a Transmission Gate Series Multiplexer (TGM), Hitachi separately petitioned the USPTO for reexamination, and the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences rejected Translogic's claims as obvious, relying on the Gorai technical article (describing a logic-circuit design algorithm without specifically disclosing multiplexers) combined with the Weste textbook (describing conventional multiplexer circuits) to conclude a skilled artisan would have combined the two references to construct the claimed TGM circuit.