Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week, I consider the patent dispute between Qualcomm and Broadcom over this patent. Here’s the abstract:
A portable data terminal includes at least two communication transceivers having different operating characteristics, one for conducting data communications on a wired subnetwork and one for conducting data communications on a wireless subnetwork. A communication processor converts data received by the communication transceivers to a predetermined format for a base module and converts data in a predetermined format from the base module to a format for transmission by a selected one of the first and second communication transceivers, thereby isolating the base module from differing characteristics of the transceivers. The communication processor is arranged to relay communications received by one transceiver for re-transmission by the other transceiver and to transfer communications from one subnetwork to the other, without activating the base module.
In essence, the functionality described here is that of a router: it receives data from one network, processes it in some way, and re-transmits it to another network. In fact, I’ve got a wireless access point in my house that takes packets from its modem or ethernet port and re-transmits them on its WiFi antenna, and vice versa. Routers have been a staple of computer networking since at least the 1980s.
Now it’s possible that in 1995, there weren’t any mobile, battery-operated, wireless routers precisely like those described here. But batteries and wireless communications weren’t unknown ideas in 1995. If you know how routers, wireless transmission, and batteries work, combining them is a perfectly obvious idea.
Likewise, the patent describes a modular router in which the user can swap out different kind of network transceivers in order to connect to different kinds of networks. But modularity was hardly an unknown concept in 1995, either. I’m pretty sure someone had built a modular router by 1995, although perhaps they hadn’t built a modular, wireless, battery-powered, router.
It makes absolutely no sense to grant a patent for a device simply because that device happens to have a set of features that hasn’t previously been combined before. It’s like filing a patent on a Swiss army knife that has a combination of blades that no one has combined before. If there’s prior art for the individual blades, then the knife is obvious, even if no one has happened to sell a knife with that particular combination of blades. By the same token, if wireless technology, battery power, and modularity were well known concepts in 1995–and they were–then the mere idea of building a router that combines them all isn’t a novel invention.
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