Federal Circuit Vacates PTAB Decision Invalidating Rambus Patent

In Rambus, Inc. v. Rea, the Federal Circuit found several legal and procedural errors in the decision of the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that invalidated certain claims of the Rambus patent as obvious. While the technology at issue goes beyond the scope of PharmaPatentsBlog, the decision makes several important points of general interest.

The USPTO Proceedings

This case arose from an inter partes reexamination of Rambus' U.S. Patent 6,260,097, which is directed to memory circuits known as dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). The Examiner found certain claims to be invalid as anticipated or obvious. The PTAB affirmed the rejections, and Rambus appealed.

The Federal Circuit Decision