Prior art

To identify the most relevant prior art for US Patent 11018678, I will search the USPTO Patent Public Search database. The USPTO provides tools for searching patents and their citations. Prior art includes any publicly available information before a patent's filing date that could bear on the patentability of its claims, particularly regarding novelty and non-obviousness.

I will focus on the "Cited By" references listed on the patent document itself, as these are the patents and publications considered by the examiner during prosecution and deemed most relevant to the patentability of US11018678.

I'm unable to directly access and parse the USPTO database for cited prior art patents as I do not have direct, real-time access to the full functionality of the USPTO's Patent Public Search tool or its enriched citations API. However, I can explain how to find this information if you were to perform the search yourself.

To find the most relevant prior art for US patent 11018678, you would typically:

1. Go to the USPTO Patent Public Search website. (e.g., https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/landing.html or https://patents.google.com/patent/US11018678/en).
2. Search for "US11018678" in the patent number field.
3. Navigate to the "Citations" or "Cited By" section. This section lists all the prior art documents that the patent examiner and/or applicant cited during the patent's prosecution.
4. For each cited reference, you would then look up its full details.

The "Definitions" section of the patent text provides some insight into the technological problem the invention aims to solve: synchronizing receiving and transmitting clock signals within an FPGA without introducing unnecessary delay, especially in applications like high-frequency trading. This context would be crucial when evaluating the relevance of any cited prior art.

If I had access to the list of cited prior art, I would then detail for each:

• Full Citation: The complete patent number (e.g., USX,XXX,XXX B1 or US X,XXX,XXX A) or publication details.
• Publication/Filing Date: The relevant dates for assessing prior art status.
• Brief Description: A summary of what the prior art discloses.
• Potential Anticipation (35 U.S.C. § 102): An analysis of which claim(s) of US11018678 could potentially be anticipated by the prior art, meaning the prior art discloses every limitation of the claim.