While 8 out of 10 Petitions seeking inter partes review are granted by the PTAB, there remain several key errors that unsuccessful Petitioners make. Among them is the failure to provide sufficient factual basis for a rationale to combine prior art references in an obviousness analysis. That issue arose, in an unsuccessful petition, in Kinetic Technologies, Inc. v. Skyworks Solutions, Inc., IPR2014-00529, where the Board found Petitioner’s motivation to combine arguments inadequate. The case involved US Pat. No. 7,921,320, directed to a single wire serial interface that may be used to control stand-alone power integrated circuits and other devices.  Decision at 3.

Petitioner, in arguing obviousness of the challenged claims, asserted that combining to two prior art references was a matter of combining know elements to yield predictable results, among other conclusory remarks. Petitioner did list several similarities in the circuits of the two references, and provided expert testimony, but did not provide much in the way of details. Id. at 14.

As such, the Board was unpersuaded by Petitioner’s argument for motivation to combine. First, the Board gave little or no weight to the expert testimony, since it was virtually identical in content to the arguments presented in the petition, and lacked facts or data to support the opinion of the expert. Specifically, the Board criticized the expert declaration as filing to “expain the ‘how,’ ‘what,’ and ‘why’ of the proposed combination of references.” Id. at 15. To that end, the Board found that the expert did not explain how the references could be combined, or how such combination would yield a predictable result.  In the final criticism of the expert testimony, the Board noted that the expert failed to explain why the ordinary artisan would have combined elements from the two references in the specific way the ‘320 invention does.

Accordingly, the Board reminded Petitioner that there must be reasoning supporting combination of references in an obviousness challenge, and rejected Petitioner’s argument for motivation to combine references, stating that the argument lacked articulated reasoning with rational underpinning. Id. at 16. As such, the Board determined that Petitioner failed to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood that it would prevail in establishing the challenged claims as unpatentable.