Opinion ID: 919
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Adequacy of the District Court's Claim Construction

Text: We review claim construction de novo. See Ball Aerosol & Specialty Container, Inc. v. Ltd. Brands, Inc., 555 F.3d 984, 989 (Fed.Cir.2009); Young v. Lumenis, Inc., 492 F.3d 1336, 1344 (Fed.Cir. 2007). When construing claims, the intrinsic evidence is the primary resource. See Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303, 1312 (Fed.Cir.2005) (en banc). Claim terms are generally given their ordinary and customary meaning, the meaning that the term would have to a person of ordinary skill in the art . . . at the time of the invention. Id. at 1312-13 (internal citations omitted). The terms, as construed by the court, must ensure that the jury fully understands the court's claim construction rulings and what the patentee covered by the claims. Sulzer Textil A.G. v. Picanol N.V., 358 F.3d 1356, 1366 (Fed. Cir.2004). Artesyn first contends that the district court's construction of the claim term POL regulator is flawed because it fails to articulate the scope of the asserted claims of the '125 patent in any meaningfully precise manner. Specifically, it argues that the court's construction of the terms adapted and near are facially vague and subjective, such that the construction left the jury free to make its own determination as to the claims' scope in violation of Markman. Here, the district court construed the claim term POL regulator in a meaningfully precise manner. The court construed POL regulator to mean: [A] dc/dc switching voltage regulator designed to receive power from a voltage bus on a printed circuit board and adapted to power a portion of the devices on the board and to be placed near the one or more devices being powered as part of a distributed board-level power system. The intrinsic record supports the district court's construction, and despite Artesyn's contention, the terms adapted to and near are not facially vague or subjective. Claims using relative terms such as near or adapted to are insolubly ambiguous only if they provide no guidance to those skilled in the art as to the scope of that requirement. See Datamize, 417 F.3d at 1347 (the definiteness of a claim's terms depends on whether those terms can be given a reasonable meaning by a person of ordinary skill in the art); see, e.g., Young, 492 F.3d at 1346 (near not indefinite); Central Admixture Pharm. Servs., Inc. v. Advanced Cardiac Solutions, 482 F.3d 1347, 1356 (Fed.Cir.2006) (adapted to not indefinite); Verve, LLC v. Crane Cams, Inc., 311 F.3d 1116, 1120 (Fed.Cir.2002) (same). Here, a person of ordinary skill in the field would understand the meaning of near and adapted to because the environment dictates the necessary preciseness of the terms. The phrase [t]o be placed near the one or more devices being powered as part of a distributed board-level power system, as recited in the court's construction, implies that the dc/dc switching voltage regulator is to be placed on the printed circuit boardsomewhere close to or at the loadthe device being powered as part of the distributed board-level power system. Moreover, reference to the '125 patent's specification demonstrates that the term near means close to or at the load. As the specification of the '125 patent states: [I]t is known to distribute an intermediate bus voltage throughout the electronic system, and include an individual point-of-load (POL) regulator, i.e. DC/DC converter, at the point of power consumption within the electronic system. This language indicates that the POL regulator is to be located just upstream from the load being powered. Likewise, Figure 1 of the '125 patent illustrates a prior art power system where the POL regulator is located at the point of power consumption, providing a standard for measuring the term near. The specification further provides guidance on where it is to be located in relation to the load. The specification recites: Ideally, the POL regulator would be physically located adjacent to the corresponding electronic circuit so as to minimize the length of the low voltage, high current lines through the electronic system. The intermediate bus voltage can be delivered to the multiple POL regulators using low current lines that minimize loss. This language unambiguously states that the regulator is to be placed adjacent to the corresponding load that it is powering so that low voltage/high currents will not be delivered over relatively long distances. The patent's functionality requirement restricts the boundaries of where the regulator can be located in relation to the load it is powering. A skilled artisan in distributed power systems would know where to place the regulator to accomplish that stated objective. Similarly, the phrase adapted to power a portion of the devices on the board, when read in conjunction with the intrinsic record, makes clear that a POL regulator is one that is capable of delivering power, at the appropriate intensity, to one or more loads on the circuit board. The specification of the '125 patent states: [A] POL regulator would be included with each respective electronic circuit to convert the intermediate bus voltage to the level required by the electronic circuit. This language unambiguously indicates to a skilled artisan that the output power of a POL regulator would be at the level required by, and thus adapted to, the electronic circuit receiving power from the POL regulator. The fact that the claim is not defined using a precise numerical measurement does not render it incapable of providing meaningful guidance to the jury because the claim language, when taken in context of the entire patent, provides a sufficiently reasonable meaning to one skilled in the art of distributed power systems. Therefore, we find that the district court's claim construction of the term POL regulator was adequate to fully describe the scope of the claims.