Clarity In Patent Applications For Electronic Systems And Circuits

Article 84 of the European Patent Convention requires that the claims of a patent application are clear and concise and are supported by the description. Failure to meet these requirements will result in an objection of lack of clarity.

When we looked at the decisions of the EPO's Technical Boards of Appeal for applications in the "Basic Electronic Circuitry" International Patent Classification H03, we found 93 decisions that involved a question of clarity, compared to 100 decisions involving questions of novelty and 272 involving questions of inventive step. Clarity objections therefore seem to be less prevalent than novelty or inventive step objections in applications related to electronics, but they still occur quite frequently.