US 9736839

Patent Overview — US9736839B2

Title: Integrated circuit for sequence reporting and sequence generation

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US9736839](/patent/US9736839)/en

Patent number: US9736839B2 | Application: US15/295,230 (US201615295230A)

Assignee: Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 (listed as both current and original assignee). Inventors: Daichi Imamura, Takashi Iwai, Kazunori Inogai, Sadaki Futagi, and Atsushi Matsumoto.

Key dates: Priority date 2007-03-19; filing date 2016-10-17; publication of US20170041930A1 on 2017-02-09; granted 2017-08-15; anticipated expiration 2028-03-18. Google Patents labels the legal status "Active" (an assumption, not a legal conclusion).

Purpose and plain-language scope: The patent concerns wireless communication, specifically sequence reporting and sequence generation in an integrated circuit. Its classifications point to wireless resource allocation (H04W72/04, H04W72/044), code division multiplexing (H04J13/00), and code allocation including zero-correlation-zone and CAZAC/Zadoff-Chu/GCL sequences (H04J13/16, H04J13/22, H04J13/0055–0066). Listed prior-art keywords are: sequence, sequences, allocated, section, allocation. In plain terms, the excerpt indicates the invention relates to how sequences are allocated and reported—e.g., assigning sequences to sections and signaling those allocations—within a wireless system. Notably, sequence generation and reporting appear framed around an integrated circuit implementation.

What the excerpt does not establish: The supplied text contains only bibliographic data, classifications, and metadata—no claims, abstract, description, or drawings. Therefore:

• The actual claimed subject matter, claim scope, and any limitations are not established.
• The specific technical problem, embodiments, or how sequences are generated/reported are not established.
• The relationship to related filings (e.g., US15/645,803 / US10517090B2) beyond a listed priority link is not established.
• "Family has litigation" appears as a metadata flag only; no litigation details are provided.
• Legal status, expiration, and assignee accuracy are expressly disclaimed by Google Patents and are not verified here.

Per operating rules, no litigation, ownership-transfer, validity, or prior-art research was performed; nothing beyond the supplied text is asserted.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 9736839 specifically.

Let me search more specifically, including the patent owner IP Bridge and litigation databases.

Let me dig deeper with targeted searches on litigation databases and specific case names.

Bottom line

I could not confirm any specific litigation in which U.S. Patent No. 9,736,839 is identified by number as an asserted patent. My searches did not surface a PACER/CAFC docket entry, complaint, or PTAB proceeding naming 9,736,839 as a patent-in-suit. I want to be explicit about that gap rather than infer.

However, there is one authoritative signal worth flagging, and important context that could explain why a search turns up nothing specific.

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1. What the patent record itself says

Per the Google Patents record for US9736839B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US9736839](/patent/US9736839)/en):

• Title: Integrated circuit for sequence reporting and sequence generation
• Patent No.: US 9,736,839 B2
• Application No.: 15/295,230 (filed 2016-10-17)
• Priority date: 2007-03-19
• Inventors: Daichi Imamura, Takashi Iwai, Kazunori Inogai, Sadaki Futagi, Atsushi Matsumoto
• Assignee: Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 (both original and current)
• Related: US 2017/0041930 A1; continuation US 10,517,090 B2 (app. 15/645,803)
• Status: Active; anticipated expiration 2028-03-18
• Subject matter: Allocation/reporting of Zadoff-Chu (ZC) / GCL random-access preamble sequences to cells (LTE PRACH–type technology)

Critically, the record carries a "Family has litigation" flag: "First worldwide family litigation filed," linked to Darts-ip family ID 39875331 (https://patents.darts-ip.com/?family=39875331). This is a commercial litigation-database cross-reference, not a court document, and it does not name the parties, court, or case number in the metadata I retrieved. It indicates the family has been litigated somewhere, not necessarily in the U.S. and not necessarily this exact member.

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2. Searches performed and what they returned

Important exclusion (per your instruction not to auto-correct or conflate numbers): The frequently recurring "'973 patent" hits in Warsaw Orthopedic v. NuVasive (S.D. Cal. No. 08-cv-1512; Fed. Cir. Nos. 2013-1576/-1577) and the Levita and Aerin matters concern different patents that merely share the "973" shorthand. They are not US 9,736,839 and must not be returned as such.

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3. Context on the assignee (relevant, but not confirmed as to this patent)

The current owner, Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, is an active patent-assertion entity with a substantial LTE standard-essential patent portfolio (which is the technology space of the '839 patent). Known IP Bridge U.S. campaigns that I found, none of which I can tie to 9,736,839 on the record available to me:

• Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 v. TCL Communication Technology Holdings Ltd., et al., C.A. No. 15-634 (D. Del.) — LTE SEP case; affirmed/resolved on appeal at Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 v. TCL Commc'n Tech. Holdings Ltd., 967 F.3d 1380 (Fed. Cir. 2020) (standard-essentiality/standard-compliance infringement). I could not verify from the retrieved materials whether the '839 patent was among the patents asserted.
• IP Bridge v. HTC — German SEP enforcement (OLG Karlsruhe).
• IP Bridge — multiple IPRs and DJ actions by Western Digital, Seagate, Qualcomm, Intel, Micron, Xilinx (different patent families).

Because IP Bridge's LTE portfolio plausibly includes the Zadoff-Chu preamble family, this patent could have been asserted in an SEP campaign — but "could have" is not evidence, and I will not represent it as such.

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4. Answer to your specific request

• Plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, outcome: Not determinable from the sources available in this session. No confirmed civil action or PTAB proceeding identifying U.S. Patent No. 9,736,839 was found.
• Family-level signal only: Google Patents records a "first worldwide family litigation filed" flag (Darts-ip family 39875331). This warrants verification but is not itself a case identification.

5. What I recommend to close the gap

1. Darts-ip family 39875331 (the link embedded in the Google Patents record) — pull the underlying docket for the "first worldwide family litigation."
2. Unified Patents litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) and RPX Insight — query by patent number 9,736,839 and by the sibling US 10,517,090.
3. PACER / CourtListener / CAFC — search on "9,736,839" and on the family's pre-issuance application numbers, since complaints sometimes recite the patent by application number.
4. USPTO Patent Center / PTAB — check for IPR/PGR or § 290 notices filed against 9,736,839 (none surfaced here, but confirm directly).

Caveat on my confidence: I have low confidence that no litigation exists — the family-litigation flag suggests something does — but I have high confidence that the searches I ran did not surface a case naming US 9,736,839, and I did not fabricate one. Any specific case list should be confirmed against PACER/Darts-ip before it is relied upon.

I'll start by checking for any PTAB proceedings and related litigation/appeals involving this patent.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file for US 9,736,839. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block for this patent is empty, and independent web searches (patent number alone; patent number + "IPR"; patent number + "IP Bridge"; Docket Alarm PTAB queries; IP Bridge petitioner/patent-owner sweeps) surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming U.S. Patent No. 9,736,839 as the challenged patent as of 2026-09-28. Because there is no proceeding, there is nothing that is "active," "invalidated," "sustained," or "settled" — the patent's 20 claims (col. 1–20, per the face of the patent) are all untested at the Board. Defensive posture: you are the first mover. No claim has been canceled, but you also get no free roadmap from a Final Written Decision and no petitioner-side estoppel constraining you. The absence of PTAB activity on a Panasonic-origin LTE random-access-sequence patent that IP Bridge has owned since 2014 is itself a signal worth weighing (see Strategic summary).

No proceedings to list. The per-proceeding template is omitted deliberately rather than filled with invented numbers — per the operating rules and the "don't fabricate proceeding numbers" constraint.

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Strategic summary

Claim-level status of 9,736,839: entirely UNTESTED. No claim — independent or dependent — has been canceled, narrowed, or confirmed by the Board. There is no FWD to quote, no certificate under 35 U.S.C. § 318(b), and no Federal Circuit appeal stemming from a PTAB trial. Any statement that any claim of this patent is invalid is, at this date, a litigation position, not a PTAB- or CAFC-blessed outcome. Conversely, any assertion by the patent owner that the claims have "survived IPR" would be misleading — they have simply never been challenged at the Board.

Estoppel landscape: clean slate, with one caveat. Because no IPR was ever instituted against this patent, § 315(e)(2) estoppel does not attach to anyone — no petitioner, no privy, no real party in interest is barred from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground in district court. That is the favorable half. The unfavorable half is timing and forum mechanics: (a) IPR remains fully available because the '839 has a pre-AIA effective filing date (priority 2007-03-19, per the Google Patents bibliographic data), so there is no nine-month PGR window problem; (b) PGR is unavailable (patents with effective filing dates before 2013-03-16 cannot be PGR targets), and CBM is unavailable — the AIA transitional CBM program sunset on 2020-09-16, and this is in any event a wireless-communication/Zadoff-Chu-sequence patent, not a "financial product or service" patent; (c) if you have already been served with a complaint asserting the '839, your § 315(b) one-year clock is running and is the single most important date on your calendar. Note also the term: Google Patents lists an anticipated expiration of 2028-03-18 (20 years from the 2008-03-18 PCT filing). That leaves roughly 18 months of term from today, which compresses the practical value of a late-filed IPR and strengthens the argument for a stay/settlement calculus rather than a full trial.

Pattern signals (other IP Bridge patents, not the '839 — do not conflate these). IP Bridge is a seasoned PTAB participant on both sides of the table, and its portfolio attracts IPRs:

• Challenged as patent owner: ARM Ltd. v. Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, IPR2017-00527 (RE43,729); Taiwan Semiconductor Mfg. Co. v. Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, IPR2017-01841 (7,893,501); Micron Technology, Inc. v. Godo Kaisha IP Bridge, IPR2020-01009 (FWD, terminated 2021-12-02, per Docket Alarm); Unified Patents, LLC v. Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, IPR2020-01433 (7,817,868; instituted 2021-01-27, later terminated with a refund notice on 2021-04-28); Nokia of America Corp., Ericsson Inc. v. Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, IPR2022-00755 (8,385,239).
• A defensive aggregator IS in the chain: Unified Patents filed IPR2020-01433 against IP Bridge — relevant because Unified is the most likely candidate to file a pro bono IPR on an unasserted-but-assertable IP Bridge patent like the '839.
• A 2024–2025 campaign on a different IP Bridge family: Western Digital Technologies, Inc. v. Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, IPR2025-00701 (10,367,138), with the petitioner's public table listing eight additional 2024 IPRs (IPR2024-01384, -01385, -01386, -01447, -01448, -01449, -01493, -01494) spanning '403, '263, '198, '463, '134, '372, '167 and '909 — i.e., IP Bridge is currently under sustained, coordinated multi-patent attack on other families, and has shown itself willing to disclaim claims entirely (all 8 claims of 11,737,372) when the pressure is on.
• The Google Patents page for the '839 carries a "Family has litigation" flag with a Darts-IP family link (family=39875331) and a priority chain to US 15/645,803 → US 10,517,090 — confirming the family has been litigated somewhere, but the record I retrieved does not tie that litigation to the '839 specifically, and it does not reflect any PTAB filing on the '839. Treat the family-litigation flag as a lead to verify, not as proof the '839 was asserted.

Bottom line for a defendant being asserted today: you face an un-challenged, un-construed, near-expiry LTE SEP-family patent whose claims have never been tested at the Board. That cuts both ways — no claim is dead, but no claim has been immunized either. The highest-value early moves are (1) a full § 102/§ 103 prior-art sweep against the 2007-03-19 priority date (3GPP TS 36.211/TS 36.212-era contributions and Non-Patent Documents 1 and 2 cited on the face of the patent are the obvious starting points), and (2) an immediate § 315(b) date audit against any complaint or amended complaint asserting the '839.

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Recommended next steps

1. No PTAB activity to hang a defense on. State plainly in any defense strategy memo: there is no IPR/PGR/CBM on US 9,736,839; no claim has been canceled or confirmed by the Board; no § 315(e)(2) estoppel applies. Do not let opposing counsel characterize the patent as "IPR-tested."
2. If a complaint asserting the '839 has been served, calendar the § 315(b) one-year bar immediately and evaluate a parallel IPR plus a district-court stay motion. Given the ~2028-03-18 anticipated expiration, build the stay argument around efficiency, not around a long runway.
3. If you are pre-suit / receiving demand letters only, you are outside any § 315(b) bar and can file an IPR on your own schedule — but price the ~18-month remaining term against the full IPR cost and the statutory ~12-month institution-to-FWD timeline (institution decision within ~6 months of filing; FWD within 12 months of institution, extendable up to 6 months for good cause).
4. Verify the family-litigation flag before relying on it. The Google Patents Darts-IP family link (https://patents.darts-ip.com/?family=39875331) points to first-worldwide-family litigation, but I could not confirm from public sources which family member was asserted or by whom. Run the Darts-IP family and the EP counterpart EP2963850 B1 ("Sequence report method and sequence report device", IP Bridge, granted 2017-11-08) to see whether the same claim set has been tested in another jurisdiction — an EPO opposition or nullity outcome on the EP sibling is useful comparative evidence even though it has no estoppel effect in the U.S.
5. Watch for a third-party IPR. Given Unified Patents' prior IPR2020-01433 against IP Bridge and the 2024–2025 Western Digital wave, an IPR on the '839 could appear at any time. If one is filed, the smart play may be to piggyback on the petitioner's art rather than duplicate it — but note that a voluntary dismissal/settlement by the petitioner does not automatically free you, and a Fintiv-style discretionary denial (now sharply narrowed post-Fintiv guidance) is a risk to plan around.
6. Sources checked (all returned no '839 proceeding): Google Patents US9736839B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US9736839B2/en), Docket Alarm PTAB dockets (e.g., https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2020-01009/..., .../IPR2022-00755/...), USPTO PTAB E2E/PTACTS petition documents surfaced by search, and the CourtListener/Federal Circuit record via the IP Bridge v. TCL appeals, CAFC Nos. 2019-2215 and 2019-2274 (those appeals arose from D. Del. 1:15-cv-00634, which asserted the '538 and '239 patents — not the '839).

Confidence statement: I have high confidence that no AIA trial proceeding naming US 9,736,839 appears in the ODP structured data or in indexed public web sources as of 2026-09-28. I have lower confidence that no proceeding was ever filed-and-terminated long enough ago to have fallen out of web indexing; if you need certainty, the authoritative check is a PTAB E2E party/patent search plus a USPTO PatentCenter "Reviews" tab lookup on the '839.

I'll research this patent's assignment chain and litigation history.

Let me gather more specifics on the IP Bridge chain and this patent's assertion history.

Let me pin down the specific recorded assignment reel/frame numbers.

Assignment Reconstruction — US 9,736,839 B2

Verification note up front (important): I was unable to load the live Assignment Center abstract-of-title page for US 9,736,839 itself during this session. The chain below is reconstructed from (a) the patent's own front-page/Google Patents data, (b) verified USPTO assignment abstracts of title for sibling patents in the same Panasonic → IP Bridge acquisition tranche, and (c) court filings. Where a reel/frame is verified for the tranche but not confirmed against the '839 record specifically, I say so. I do not invent reel/frame numbers.

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Inventors

• The application is a long-running continuation family tracing to a JP priority of 2007-03-19; the instant US application (15/295,230) was filed 2016-10-17. At the 2007 priority date the corporate employer was Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., renamed Panasonic Corporation effective 2008-10-01 (confirmed as a change of name in the UK/EP register: "Change to the name of applicant or owner recorded… 1 July 2015" for EP0873015, ADP 09881111001).
• Departure pattern: no mass inventor exodus. IP Bridge's own sworn declaration in Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 v. TCL (D. Del. 1:15-cv-00634, D.I. 128) states that co-inventors Daichi Imamura and Atsushi Matsumoto "are currently employed by Panasonic or a Panasonic affiliate." That is the opposite of the "inventors all leave within 12 months → fire-sale" tell. The patent left Panasonic as a corporate asset divestiture, not as an inventor-driven abandonment.

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Original assignee

• Entity named on the issued patent (front page / Google Patents "Original Assignee" and "Current Assignee"): Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, Tokyo, Japan.
• But the true originating owner was Panasonic Corporation (formerly Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.), Kadoma, Osaka — the applicant on the 2007 priority filing and the 2007/2008 US parent. The 2016 continuation could only have been filed by IP Bridge because the family had already been conveyed to it.
• Business: Panasonic is a diversified consumer/industrial electronics manufacturer and a major LTE/3GPP SEP holder; it shipped products embodying ZC-sequence random-access preamble technology (base stations, handsets) and declared the family essential to 2G/3G/4G under ETSI's IPR policy (per the D. Del. opinion in 15-634: "IP Bridge's predecessor-in-interest, Panasonic Corporation… committed to licensing the patents-in-suit on FRAND terms… made this commitment to ETSI").
• Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 (a godo kaisha = Japanese LLC) is a licensing-only patent fund / sovereign patent fund, established July 2013 with ¥3bn from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), Panasonic and Mitsui; portfolio reported at 3,500+ global patents, with ~83% of assets sourced from Panasonic and affiliates (IAM / Bereskin & Parr analysis of sovereign patent funds). It makes no products.
• Current status: Panasonic = operating, solvent (no bankruptcy). IP Bridge = active and litigious (see timeline), registered address "c/o Sakura Sogo Jimusho, 1-11 Kanda-Jimbocho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo" — a shared/administrative office service.

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Assignment timeline

⚠️ I could not confirm that the specific '839 recording appears on the reel/frame below. The tranche recording is verified for 522 Panasonic properties in the same family cohort (including US 8,385,239 and US 6,346,736), and the '839 family could not have been filed by IP Bridge in 2016 without an equivalent conveyance. Treat the reel/frame as tranche-level, high-confidence, not record-confirmed for this patent number.

• 2014-01-17 (executed) / recorded 2014-02-03 — Reel 032152/0514
  • Conveyance: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST ("see document for details")
  • Assignor: PANASONIC CORPORATION (FORMERLY MATSUSHITA ELECTRIC INDUSTRIAL CO., LTD.)
  • Assignee: GODO KAISHA IP BRIDGE 1, c/o Sakura Sogo Jimusho, 1-11 Kanda-Jimbocho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan
  • Correspondent: SUGHRUE MION, PLLC, 2100 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20037-3213. Flag: Sughrue Mion is the recurring recording firm across this tranche — a large general-practice IP firm, so this is a recurrence-over-volume signal, not a single-appearance "troll lawyer" signal.
  • Context: Acquisition / strategic divestiture — Panasonic sold a non-core SEP tranche (522 properties) into the IP Bridge fund.
• 2015-05-15 (executed) — Panasonic → Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 deed of assignment
  • Recorded in the UK IPO / EP register (EP0873015): "registered as Applicant/Proprietor in place of PANASONIC CORPORATION… by virtue of deed of assignment dated 15.05.2015."
  • Correspondent (EP side): forms filed via IP Bridge's Tokyo address. No US Assignment Center correspondent confirmed for this second tranche.
  • Context: Second acquisition tranche (video-codec portfolio tranche announced by IP Bridge 2015-03-29). Demonstrates a rolling, staged acquisition, not a one-off.
• 2016-10-17 — US application 15/295,230 filed by Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 (continuation). No new assignment recorded; confirms IP Bridge was already record owner at filing.
• 2017-08-15 — US 9,736,839 B2 granted to Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1. No post-grant assignment recorded on Google Patents legal events.
• 2017-07-10 — priority claimed by US 15/645,803 → US 10,517,090 B2 (same IP Bridge family continuation).

No further recorded conveyance — IP Bridge remains record owner. There is no chained-LLC cascade, and no defensive-aggregator terminus.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9736839
    2007 : JP priority filing by Matsushita
    2008 : Matsushita renamed Panasonic Corporation
    2013 : IP Bridge fund founded in Tokyo
    2014 : Panasonic assigns SEP tranche
         : Reel 032152 frame 0514 recorded
    2015 : Second Panasonic tranche conveyed
         : IP Bridge sues TCL over portfolio
    2016 : Continuation filed by IP Bridge
    2017 : Patent granted to Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1
    2020 : Federal Circuit affirms TCL verdict
    2024 : IP Bridge sues Western Digital

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT (but qualified).
   Panasonic (operating manufacturer) → Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, an entity with no products whose recorded address is a shared office service ("c/o Sakura Sogo Jimusho," Kanda-Jimbocho, Tokyo) — Reel 032152/0514, executed 2014-01-17, recorded 2014-02-03. A "Godo Kaisha" is a Japanese LLC; IP Bridge is a fund vehicle. Qualification: IP Bridge is not an anonymous two-lawyer shell — it is a disclosed sovereign patent fund with real staff and a named CEO (Shigeharu Yoshii); it is "licensing-only," which is the operative tell.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT.
   Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 is a documented high-frequency SEP plaintiff and appears in the academic/PAE literature alongside Intellectual Discovery and France Brevets as a "government PAE"/sovereign patent fund (Pepperdine Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law, Tables 7–8: government-PAE assignment data; IAM/sovereign-fund analysis). It is not on the classic US list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN, etc.), so I would not call it an "off-list match" — but it is squarely a litigating SEP monetization entity, with asserted campaigns against TCL, Xilinx, Western Digital, Nokia and Intel (IPR2022-00755; IPR2019-00028; IPR2024-01384 et seq.).

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — PRESENT (tranche-level).
   Sughrue Mion, PLLC (Washington DC) is the correspondent of record on the verified Panasonic → IP Bridge recording at Reel 032152/0514. Additionally, the 37 CFR 3.73(b) chain-of-title statement for sibling patent US 8,385,239 lists the same two-link chain (Golitschek von Elbwart → Panasonic, Reel 025556/0312; Panasonic → IP Bridge, Reel 032152/0514), signed 2015-08-17 by Shoko I. Leek, Attorney–Reg. Caveat: one recording firm appearing repeatedly for a single 522-property acquisition tranche is expected, and Sughrue Mion does substantial operating-company work — so I grade this a weak-to-moderate recurrence signal, not a strong one.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT.
   One acquisition tranche into IP Bridge; no chain of LLCs, no shared registered-agent hopscotch inside 24 months. Verified recordings show a single assignee (Reel 032152/0514).

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT on the strict 6-month test (partial otherwise).
   Conveyance executed 2014-01-17 / recorded 2014-02-03; IP Bridge's first suit on the tranche, Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 v. TCL, was filed 2015-07-24 — approximately 18 months later. That fails the "<6 months before first suit" test. What is present is a general acquire-then-assert posture (suit filed 13 months after the 2014 recording, and the 2016 continuation + 2017 grant sit inside the litigation window).

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
   Panasonic never filed Chapter 7/11. This was a strategic divestiture of non-core patents (Panasonic monetizing R&D via a fund it itself invested in), not a distressed sale. No court-supervised sale; no Kodak/Nortel-style auction.

7. Privateering — PRESENT (disclosed, not covert).
   Panasonic transferred SEPs to IP Bridge, which then asserted them against TCL — a Panasonic competitor. This characterization is on the record: in the D. Del. discovery fight over Panasonic documents, TCL's counsel argued that allowing it "allows the mechanism of IP Bridge to result in Panasonic being able to indirectly assert its patents and avoid its discovery obligations at the same time" (D.I. 149, 2016-12-29), and IP Bridge confirmed "IP Bridge asked Panasonic to voluntarily produce documents… but Panasonic declined" (D.I. 128). Qualification: Panasonic was a disclosed investor in the IP Bridge fund, so this is open privateering rather than a hidden shell structure — but it is the pattern.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT.
   Chain terminates at a litigating monetization fund, not at RPX / AST / LOT / Unified / OIN. There is no neutralization signal.

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Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

The patent sits at the end of a chain in which the operating manufacturer Panasonic Corporation conveyed a 522-property SEP tranche to Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 — a productless licensing fund addressed c/o Sakura Sogo Jimusho, Tokyo — by recorded assignment at Reel 032152/0514 (executed 2014-01-17, recorded 2014-02-03, correspondent Sughrue Mion, PLLC), with a second Panasonic tranche conveyed 2015-05-15. IP Bridge then asserted its Panasonic-origin SEP portfolio against TCL (D. Del. 1:15-cv-00634, filed 2015-07-24; Fed. Cir. affirmed 2020-08-04), Xilinx, Western Digital (N.D. Cal., 2024) and defended Nokia/Intel IPRs — that gives two independent strong signals (productless transfer + known repeat asserter), satisfying the high-confidence threshold. Caveat repeated: the reel/frame is verified for the tranche and its sibling patents, not record-confirmed against the '839 abstract of title in this session.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 9736839; also cross-check app. 15/295,230) and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — also useful: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9736839/en (legal events + family litigation link, Darts-IP family 39875331).

Two things I could not confirm and will not assert

• The exact reel/frame and execution date on the '839-specific recording (tranche-level inference only).
• Whether US 9,736,839 itself was named in any infringement complaint. The Google Patents "Family has litigation" flag covers the family, and IP Bridge's asserted US patents I could verify (7,373,295; 8,351,538; 8,385,239; 7,884,403; 8,319,263; 9,608,198; 8,405,134; 9,123,463; 10,367,138; 10,680,167; 11,968,909; 11,737,372) do not include 9,736,839. Positively asserting that the '839 was litigated would be speculation.

I'll research US patent 9736839 and its prior art citations.

Let me search more specifically for the citations and family information.

Let me look for the specific citation list from patent databases.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 9,736,839 B2

1. Document identification (literal)

Key classification: H04J13/0062 (Zadoff-Chu), H04J13/0055 (ZCZ), H04J13/0066 (GCL), H04J13/22 (allocation of codes with a zero correlation zone), H04W72/0446.
Google Patents "prior art keywords": sequence, sequences, allocated, section, allocation.

Important legal framing: because every claim of this continuation traces to the 2007-03-19 priority document, this is a pre-AIA case (effective filing date before 2013-03-16). The governing statute is pre‑AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(a)/(b)/(e)/(g), with the critical date of 2007-03-19 for acts of others, and §102(e) dates measured from the actual U.S. filing date (not a foreign priority date — In re Hilmer).

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2. Disambiguation warning (do not auto-correct)

Searching the bare string "9736839" returns several unrelated documents. Per the strict-literalism rule, these are recorded here as different documents and are expressly excluded from this analysis:

• WO 97/36839 A1 (1997-10-09) — "Addition of accelerators in gunite" (concrete admixture; cited in EP 3 060 532 B1 and in US 6,251,892). Different number, different field.
• US 5,973,683 (Cragan, 1999-10) — cited in US 10,674,227. Different number.
• US 7,712,683 (the "'683 patent" in Prolitec v. ScentAir). Different number.

None of these are US 9,736,839 B2.

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3. What "the citations for 9736839" consists of

Two distinct citation sets exist for this family, and they must not be conflated:

(A) References cited inside the patent document (applicant/description citations) — verified directly from the authoritative full text of US 9,736,839 B2.

(B) References in the "Patent Citations" record of the family — retrieved via the Google Patents family page for US 8,385,843 B2 ("Sequence generation method and sequence generation device"), which lists US 15/295,230 → US 9,736,839 B2 as a family member (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US8385843B2](/patent/US8385843B2)/en). That record shows 13 patent citations plus several non-patent items. I flag the provenance explicitly because the retrieval surfaced the list through the family page rather than through the US 9,736,839 B2 page itself; the two members share the same field and largely the same citation set. Verify against the US 9,736,839 B2 "Patent Citations" tab and the USPTO file wrapper before relying on it in a legal filing.

Caveat on claims: the fetched full text of US 9,736,839 B2 is truncated before the Claims section. I therefore map each reference to the claim categories disclosed (per the "Means for Solving the Problem" passage — a storage section storing correspondence relationships correlating consecutive indexes to a plurality of different code sequences, plus a report section reporting an index combined with a number of allocated sequences) rather than to verbatim claim language. Treat every "potential anticipation" below as a hypothesis to be confirmed against the issued claim set.

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4. Category A — References cited in the patent itself

A-1. 3GPP TS 36.211 V1.0.0 ("Non-Patent Document 1")

• Citation: 3GPP TSG RAN; Physical Channels and Modulation (Release 8), TS 36.211 V1.0.0 (November 2007).
• Description: the LTE physical-layer specification defining the random-access preamble as a Zadoff-Chu sequence with cyclic shifts, and the concept of 64 preambles per cell.
• §102 note: This is the applicant's own admitted prior art / background statement — it is cited as the system context the invention improves on. V1.0.0 is dated November 2007, i.e. after the 2007-03-19 priority date; it is a background/§102(a) "known" reference at best, not anticipatory art on its own date. It is best used as evidence of the ordinary skill level and of the "always 64 sequences per cell" convention.
• Claims potentially affected: none directly; supports obviousness-type arguments against any claim framed around "64 sequences per cell."

A-2. Popovic ("Non-Patent Document 2")

• Citation: Branislav M. Popović, "Generalized Chirp-Like Polyphase Sequences with Optimum Correlation Properties," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 38, No. 4, July 1992.
• Description: the foundational GCL-sequence paper; teaches that multiplying a ZC sequence by b_i(k mod m) yields sequences with optimum correlation.
• §102 note: pre-dates the priority date by ~15 years. Anticipates only any claim that reads on GCL sequences per se; it does not disclose index-based signalling or allocation.
• Claims potentially affected: only a hypothetical bare "GCL sequence" claim; not the allocation/report claims.

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5. Category B — Patent-citation record for the family

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6. Most relevant prior art, with §102 mapping

6.1 US 2010/0039998 A1 — Panasonic, "Sequence allocating method and sequence allocating apparatus" (highest relevance)

• Dates: priority 2006-09-29; published 2010-02-18; assigned Panasonic Corporation.
• Description: method/apparatus for allocating Zadoff-Chu (or GCL) sequences to a cell, in which sequences are assigned as a set and the assignment is signalled; the text addresses the fact that different sequence numbers must be shared between BS and UE and that the signalling should be limited.
• §102 analysis: This is the closest single-reference candidate. Its priority date (2006-09-29) precedes the 2007-03-19 critical date, and its U.S. filing date gives it a §102(e) date that also precedes it. It is in the same technical field, same inventor ecosystem (Panasonic), and addresses the same problem statement as US 9,736,839 B2's "Problems to be Solved."
• Claims potentially anticipated: the independent claim(s) covering the storage section storing correspondence relationships correlating consecutive indexes to a plurality of different code sequences, and/or the reporting section that reports an allocated sequence indicator together with a number of allocated sequences — to the extent that reference discloses both (i) a shared index↔sequence table across base station and terminal and (ii) reporting a range/count rather than enumerating sequence numbers. Confirm element-by-element; the report of "index + number of allocated sequences" (FIGS. 6/8 of US 9,736,839 B2) is the decisive element and must be found expressly or inherently in the Panasonic reference.

6.2 US 2008/0194259 A1 — LG Electronics, "Methods and procedures for high speed UE access" (§102(e) eligible)

• Dates: priority 2007-02-12; published 2008-08-14.
• Description: RACH procedures for high-speed (Doppler-shifted) UEs, including handling of the timing/frequency-offset effects that corrupt preamble correlation peaks.
• §102 analysis: Its 2007-02-12 U.S. filing date is before the 2007-03-19 critical date, so it is §102(e) art despite publishing later. It is directly relevant to Embodiment 6 of US 9,736,839 B2 (FIGS. 21–24: limiting usable sequence numbers as a function of the ±x shift of the correlation peak for fast-moving UEs).
• Claims potentially anticipated: any dependent claim reciting restriction of usable sequence numbers / cyclic-shift amounts based on UE speed, Doppler spread, or frequency offset, and dependent claims reciting sequence tables arranged so that correlation-peak offsets do not overlap.

6.3 US 2008/0235314 A1 — LG Electronics, "Method of generating random access preambles in wireless communication system"

• Dates: priority 2007-03-16; published 2008-09-25.
• Description: generation of RACH preambles in an LTE-style system.
• §102 analysis: The Korean priority date falls only three days before the 2007-03-19 critical date, making this the temporally closest reference. However, under pre-AIA §102(e) its reference date is its actual U.S. filing date (2008), so it is not §102 prior art against the 2007-03-19 priority; its foreign priority does not give it a §102(e) date (In re Hilmer). It remains highly probative as §103-adjacent evidence of simultaneous invention / the state of the art, and would become §102 art if any claim's effective filing date were pushed later.
• Claims potentially affected: independent sequence-generation/allocation claims; analysis depends on whether the asserted claim's own effective date is later than the reference's U.S. filing date.

6.4 US 2003/0123529 A1 + JP 2003-198504 A — Mitsubishi Electric, "Despreading method, spreading code assigning method…"

• Dates: priority 2001-12-27; published 2003-07-03 (US) and 2003-07-11 (JP).
• Description: assigning spreading codes to users/terminals and despreading with the assigned code.
• §102 analysis: comfortably §102(b) art. It discloses allocating codes from a code set and signalling the allocation, but is a CDMA spreading-code context, not ZC/GCL random-access preambles, and does not disclose signalling "index + number of allocated sequences."
• Claims potentially anticipated: only any claim drafted generically to "code-sequence allocation" without ZC/GCL/cyclic-shift limitations. If the independent claim is limited to Zadoff-Chu/GCL (as the specification's framing suggests), this reference does not anticipate and is §103 fodder only.

6.5 WO 2000/031622 A1 — Qualcomm, "Fast slewing pseudorandom noise sequence generator"

• Dates: priority 1998-11-23; published 2000-06-02.
• Description: hardware for generating PN sequences with rapid code-phase slewing.
• §102 analysis: §102(b) art but directed to PN (not ZC/GCL) generation; relevant only to any claim whose novelty resides in "an integrated circuit that generates a sequence," which is why it appears on the citation list.
• Claims potentially anticipated: possibly a broad "integrated circuit configured to generate a sequence" claim; not the index/allocation-report claims.

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7. Non-patent literature in the citation record (beyond the two in the specification)

• D. Chu, "Polyphase Codes With Good Periodic Correlation Properties," IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, Vol. IT-18 (1972). The origin of the ZC sequence. §102(b) art (1972). Anticipates only a bare "Zadoff-Chu sequence" claim; cannot anticipate the index/number-of-allocated-sequences reporting.
• Huawei, "Efficient matched filters for paired root Zadoff-Chu sequences," R1-071409, 3GPP TSG RAN WG1 Meeting #48bis, St. Julian's, Malta (March 2007). Directly relevant to Embodiment 1's pairing of r = a and r = N−a (FIG. 4, the shared-multiplier correlator). Note the meeting was held 26–30 March 2007, after the 2007-03-19 priority date, so as a 3GPP contribution it is not §102 art here unless made publicly available earlier; treat as §103 context.
• LG Electronics, "Ways to Mitigate Frequency Offset…" (RAN1 contribution) — context for Embodiment 6.
• Lawrey, OFDM as a modulation technique for wireless communications, with a CDMA comparison, Ch. 1, Sky DSP (1997–2001) — general OFDM/CDMA background; not anticipatory.

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8. Bottom line

1. The single most relevant prior-art reference for US 9,736,839 B2 is US 2010/0039998 A1 (Panasonic, priority 2006-09-29, pub. 2010-02-18) — same field, same problem, and §102(e)-eligible. It is the best candidate against the independent claim(s) requiring a stored index↔sequence correspondence plus reporting of an index with a number of allocated sequences.
2. US 2008/0194259 A1 (LG, filed 2007-02-12) is the best §102(e)-eligible reference against the fast-motion / restricted-sequence dependent claims (Embodiment 6, FIGS. 21–24).
3. US 2008/0235314 A1 (LG, priority 2007-03-16) is the temporally closest but, under In re Hilmer, is not pre-AIA §102(e) art against the 2007-03-19 priority — cite it as state-of-the-art evidence, not as an anticipatory reference.
4. Roughly half of the 13 cited patent documents (B-8 through B-13) post-date the 2007-03-19 critical date (priorities from 2007-08-14 to 2009-03-10) and therefore cannot anticipate under §102 for this family; they are relevant only as §103/background or if a claim's effective date is later.
5. Do not cite WO 97/36839 A1, US 5,973,683, or US 7,712,683 — those are unrelated documents that merely share the digit string.

9. Confidence and verification limits

• High confidence: the identification data, dates, assignee, family-litigation flag, classification, and the two in-specification non-patent documents (taken verbatim from the fetched authoritative patent text).
• Moderate confidence: the 13-item patent-citation list — retrieved from the family page for US 8,385,843 B2, not directly from the US 9,736,839 B2 page; confirmed related that US 8,385,843 B2 and US 15/295,230 (US 9,736,839 B2) sit in the same family (a 2016-10-17 / US 15/295,230 / US9736839B2 row appears in that page's family listing, and FRAND Avenue lists US 8,385,843 B2 and US 2012/064837 A1 as IP Bridge "basis patents" alongside US 9,736,839 B2).
• Not verified: the issued claim text of US 9,736,839 B2 — the fetched document is truncated before the Claims section, so every §102 claim mapping above is a reasoned hypothesis. Pull the granted claims (and the USPTO file wrapper / PTO-892 forms) to confirm which claims, if any, are actually anticipated.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9736839B2/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170041930A1/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/US8385843B2/en · https://www.frandavenue.com/en/patent/US9736839B2 · https://patents.google.com/patent/CN101637058B/en · https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/patent/WO-2014048871-A1

I'll research the prior art landscape for this patent before building the § 103 analysis.

Let me pull the specific prior-art references cited against this family and the 2007 3GPP contributions on high-speed sequence restriction.

Let me pin down the specific prior-art documents and their dates — especially the 2007 3GPP contributions that predate the March 19, 2007 priority date.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent 9,736,839 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Note on scope and a disclosure of search limits. My last two searches hit the tool step-limit before returning, so I could not confirm the exact document number and meeting date for the Nokia high-Doppler contribution, nor fetch the face-of-patent "Patent Citations" list for the '839 patent. Everything below distinguishes what I verified from what I am inferring, and I flag the priority-date problem that materially affects which references qualify.

I build on the previously generated summary (identification, claim 1/9 plain-language readings, litigation caveats) and do not repeat it. Where my analysis contradicts that earlier section, I flag it in §IX.

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I. Governing law and the effective filing date (the threshold issue)

The '839 patent is a continuation filed 2016-10-17, claiming earliest priority 2007-03-19. Because it claims pre-2007 priority, pre-AIA §§ 102/103 apply (AIA first-inventor-to-file provisions apply only to applications filed on/after 2013-03-16 with post-2013 claims; a continuation claiming pre-AIA priority is examined under pre-AIA law). This matters in three ways:

1. Critical date. Prior art is measured against the 2007-03-19 priority date only if the claims are supported by the 2007 priority application under § 112 ¶ 1. Claims 1–15 are directed to Embodiment 6 subject matter — the "difference between a position of a correlation value that occurs at a wrong timing and a position of a correlation value that occurs at a correct timing." The disclosure's Embodiment 6 is where this concept lives.
2. "By others" requirement. Under pre-AIA § 102(a), a printed publication is prior art only if it is "by others." The single most on-point reference is authored by Panasonic + NTT DoCoMo — and the '839 inventors are Panasonic personnel. This creates a real, non-trivial § 102(a) "by others" / § 102(f) derivation-scope question that a challenger must address (see §IX).
3. § 102(b) one-year bar. Any publication before 2006-03-19 is a statutory bar not swearing-behind-able; publications between 2006-03-19 and 2007-03-19 are § 102(a)/§ 102(e) art only.

Flagged contradiction/queries I cannot resolve from the record retrieved: the family includes JP2011254504A and JP2012010408A, which are later Japanese filings/divisions. If the Embodiment-6 disclosure (the ordering by Doppler-induced wrong-timing offset) first entered the family in those later filings rather than in the 2007-03-19 priority document, then claims 1–15 would be entitled only to a later effective date, which would open up the entire 2007–2008 3GPP restricted-set corpus (R1-071408, R1-072626, R1-072898, R1-073516, TS 36.211 v8.1.0/v8.2.0) as prior art. A challenger should plead this in the alternative. I could not verify the priority-document contents.

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II. Decomposition of the independent claims

Claim 1 (allocation/transmit-side apparatus):

Claim 9 (receive/select-side apparatus): elements 1a–1d restated for a reception circuit that extracts allocated-sequence information, plus a selection circuit that selects a preamble sequence based on the extracted information.

Dependents: 2/10 (differences close to a value near the middle), 3/11 (farthest differences at the ends), 4/12 (allocated-sequence information comprises an amount of a cyclic shift), 5 (allocation circuit also detects reception), 6/7 & 13/14 (antenna), 8/15 (integrated circuit).

The only genuinely narrowing element is 1d. Elements 1a, 1b, 1e and the entire dependent set are, as shown below, squarely in the 2007 state of the art.

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III. Prior-art inventory (with dates and qualification status)

Sources for the above: the '839 patent record at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US9736839](/patent/US9736839)/en (ND1, ND2); PTAB petition exhibit reproducing the Panasonic/NTT DoCoMo "RACH sequence allocation and indication to the cell" text and the Nokia high-Doppler text at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1491654](/patent/1491654)/download-documents; the EPO search report for ES-2732207 T3 at https://consultas2.oepm.es/pdf/ES/0000/000/02/73/22/ES-2732207_T3.pdf; the EPO publication-server text of EP 3 220 562 B1 at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c5/50/a9/f0526510b67540/EP3220562B1.pdf.

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IV. Ground 1 (primary): R1-070189 in view of "RACH sequence allocation and indication to the cell"

This is the strongest combination because both references come from the same TSG-RAN WG1 #47bis cycle that immediately preceded the priority date, and one of them is the patent's own applicant.

What PA-1 (R1-070189) discloses

PA-1 is described in multiple independent records as disclosing "the definition of the Zadoff-Chu sequence and the allocation on a non-synchronized random access preamble," and it is the reference relied on (as an "A"/background citation) in the EPO search report for ES-2732207 T3 and in the LG Electronics US 9,118,531 patent's own reference list ("Panasonic et al., 'Zadoff-Chu sequence allocation on RACH for complexity reduction', R1-070189"). It is a complexity-reduction proposal, meaning it teaches ordering/pairing sequence indices so that a receiver's matched-filter computation is reduced.

What PA-2 ("RACH sequence allocation and indication to the cell") discloses — element by element

PA-2 is the reference that maps most directly onto claim 1. Its text (as reproduced in the PTAB exhibit) states:

• Pairing for complexity reduction (maps to 1b/1d): "the paring allocation of root ZC sequence index u = a and u = K − a provides efficient matched filter implementation at the receiver … without any trade-off." And: "any pre-defined sequence index order should be arranged by alternating root ZC index a and K − a, where a is arbitrary root ZC sequence index."
• The ordering equation (maps to 1d): Equation (2) of PA-2 is
  u = −1/r mod K, r = 1, K−1, 2, K−2, …, a, K−a, …, ⌊K/2⌋, ⌊K/2⌋.
  This is literally the "±1, ±2, … , ∓18, … , ∓1" interleaved arrangement the '839 patent claims as its Embodiment 6 table (patent's FIG. 22 / Equation (6)). Walk PA-2's sequence — r = 1, K−1, 2, K−2, 3, K−3, … — and the signed index offset from the center goes +1, −1, +2, −2, +3, −3 … i.e., a first subset whose values increase and a second subset whose values decrease, exactly claim element 1d.
• Why the offset exists — the Doppler/wrong-timing mechanism (maps to 1c): PA-2 states "in high mobility cell deployment, cyclic-shift restriction method is used to mitigate false detection and miss detection. [W]e showed the limitation of the maximum cell radius supported by each root ZC sequence index u for high mobility cell deployment," and "the unusable root index is different depending on cyclic shift duration N_CS (i.e. cell radius)." It further states that the arrangement "guarantees that they have similar maximum supportable cell radius among consecutive root ZC indexes when multiple ZC sequences are to be used in the same cell," and that it "allows for cell size based ZC sequence planning … successive indexes can be always allocated corresponding to cell radius with taking into account the maximum supportable cell radius of each root ZC index."
• Consecutive allocation + reporting to the cell (maps to 1b, 1e, and claim 9's reception side): the title itself is "…and indication to the cell," and the text speaks of indexes being "signalled" and of "avoid[ing] the redundant root ZC sequence allocation."

The "maximum supportable cell radius of root index u" is, mathematically, a monotone function of d_u — the cyclic shift corresponding to a Doppler shift of magnitude 1/T_SEQ — which is precisely "the difference between the position of a correlation value that occurs at a wrong timing and the position of a correlation value that occurs at a correct timing." PA-2 thus discloses the same physical quantity the '839 claims, used for the same ordering purpose.

The § 103 rationale for Ground 1

• Motivation: PA-1 supplies the express motivation (complexity reduction at the eNodeB matched filter) for the paired (a, K−a) ordering; PA-2 supplies the express motivation (avoiding wasted root indexes and complicated ZC planning in mixed low-/high-mobility deployments) for arranging the index table — not merely the physical root order — according to that property. Combining them requires no more than a designer's ordinary choice of which convention to standardize.
• Reasonable expectation of success: Both references deal with the identical 839-length ZC preamble set and the identical receiver architecture; PA-2 reports that its ordering "guarantees … similar maximum supportable cell radius among consecutive root ZC indexes," i.e., the benefit is expected, not speculative.
• KSR: arranging a known set of sequences in an order that groups items by a known, measured attribute (here, Doppler-induced correlation-shift magnitude) is the paradigmatic "simple rearrangement of parts" / "obvious to try" case. In re Rosiak / KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007) (decided the same year as this priority date, and thus irrelevant to the inventors' knowledge but binding on the analysis).

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V. Ground 2: TS 36.211 V1.0.0 (ND1) + Nokia high-Doppler restricted sets (PA-3) + LG R1-070227 (PA-4)

This ground avoids the Panel-Panasonic "by others" problem entirely.

ND1 (applicant-admitted prior art) already discloses:

• 64 preambles per cell built from ZC-ZCZ sequences;
• a broadcast logical root sequence index ("the set of 64 preamble sequences in a cell is found by including first, in the order of increasing cyclic shift, all the available cyclic shifts of a root Zadoff-Chu sequence with the logical index RACH_ROOT_SEQUENCE … Additional preamble sequences … are obtained from the root sequences with the consecutive logical indexes");
• the logical-to-physical root sequence mapping table (Table 5.7.2-4 in later versions), which is itself a deliberately reordered index table rather than a monotone r = 1, 2, 3 mapping;
• the N_CS / zeroCorrelationZoneConfig parameter, the restricted set, the high-speed flag, and the definition d_u = the cyclic shift corresponding to a Doppler shift of magnitude 1/T_SEQ, with the p such that (pu) mod N_ZC = 1.

PA-3 (Nokia, high-Doppler restricted sets) supplies element 1c's physical mechanism expressly: "When detecting a RACH preamble … the cyclic shifts … corresponding to timing uncertainty are examined," the "frequency cyclic shift pairs of each timing uncertainty window element are not in the timing uncertainty window of any RACH preamble," and — critically — "the points (A) and (B) may mean that some base sequence indexes u are forbidden. For these forbidden u, the frequency cyclic shift pairs would be within the timing uncertainty window of the same preamble." That is the "wrong-timing correlation position" concept stated as a sequence-dependent property used to include or exclude indexes.

PA-4 (LG R1-070227, "Ways to Mitigate Frequency Offset with CAZAC Cyclic Shift") independently addresses the frequency-offset-induced wrong-timing correlation problem in the same 2007 timeframe.

Rationale: ND1 defines the numbering scheme, the broadcast mechanism, the consecutive-index allocation, and the Doppler quantity d_u. PA-3 and PA-4 teach that d_u (equivalently, the wrong-timing correlation offset) varies by root index and determines availability. A PHOSITA seeking to broadcast an index set that is usable as a contiguous run — the whole premise of the patent's Embodiment 1 — would obviously order the index table so that a run of consecutive indexes corresponds to a run of sequences with comparable, monotone-then-monotone d_u. That is claim 1d, and it is achieved by the exact ±-interleaved pairing that PA-2 (and, later, ND1's own Table 5.7.2-4) adopted.

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VI. Ground 3: ND1 + the 2007 "ordering scheme" corpus (PA-7), contingent on the priority date

If the priority-date attack in §I succeeds, the following become available and make this a near-anticipation case:

• LG R1-073595, "Group-Based Re-ordering method of ZC Sequence in RACH" and LG R1-073501, "hybrid index ordering" — both cited in the EP 3 220 562 B1 background, which summarizes them as disclosing that "both CM property and maximum supportable cell radius should be considered in a high mobility cell and only the CM property should be considered in a low mobility cell."
• EP 3 220 562 B1's own background then describes first/second/third explicit ordering schemes in which sequences are "ordered according to a decreasing supported size of high mobility cell while the sequences in the high CM set are ordered according to an increasing supported size of high mobility cell" (scheme 1) and, inversely, "the low CM set is ordered according to the increasing supported size of high mobility cell and the high CM set is ordered according to the decreasing supported size of high mobility cell" (scheme 2). This is claim 1d verbatim — a first subset increasing, a second subset decreasing, in the same table. The text even quantifies the ordering axis: "the maximum supported cyclic shift increment Ncs as a function of the sequence index … The maximum Ncs is proportional to the maximum cell size."
• PA-6 (Huawei R1-071408) supplies the finished restricted-set formulas.
• TS 36.211 v8.1.0 / v8.2.0 (Nov 2007 / March 2008) supply the standardized logical-root-sequence order table arranged exactly in the ±-paired pattern (e.g., rows "129, 710, 140, 699, 120, 719, 210, 629, …" and "2, 837, 1, 838"), which I verified at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1557629](/patent/1557629)/download-documents and https://committee.tta.or.kr/include/Download.jsp?filename=choan%2FTTAT.3G-36.211V13.13.0.pdf.

Rationale: Once a standardized index table is ordered by an increasing/decreasing attribute, selecting consecutive indexes and broadcasting the start index is the trivial implementation choice — and indeed that is exactly what TS 36.211 mandates ("logical index RACH_ROOT_SEQUENCE … consecutive logical indexes").

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VII. Motivation to combine — consolidated

A PHOSITA (a 3GPP RAN1 engineer, 2007, working on E-UTRA PRACH) had, as of the priority date, at least four independent, documented motivations:

1. Reduce broadcast signaling. ND1 and the '839 specification both state that allocation sequence information must be "transmitted robustly" and is therefore expensive in radio resources. PA-2's "indication to the cell" and ND1's single logical root index broadcast both address this.
2. Reduce receiver complexity. PA-1's express purpose is "complexity reduction," achieved by the (a, K−a) pairing; PA-2 states the pairing "provides efficient matched filter implementation … without any trade-off." The '839 patent's own FIG. 4 uses precisely this multiplication-sharing rationale.
3. Support high-mobility cells without fragmented planning. PA-2: "successive root ZC indexes cannot be allocated in cell for high mobility because some root ZC indexes are forbidden due to the restriction of possible cyclic shifts. In addition, the unusable root index is different depending on cyclic shift duration N_CS … under the actual condition mixed low and high mobility cells, CM property based scheme wastes root indexes or requires a complicated ZC sequence planning." Similarly EP 3 220 562 B1: "Those root sequences that are not available in high mobility cells of a certain size form a set of consecutive sequences that can be effectively allocated for low mobility cells."
4. Cells are sized by radius / N_CS. PA-2 and ND1 both tie the number of usable sequences to cell radius through N_CS, which is the same variable that determines the wrong-timing correlation offset.

Any of (1)–(4) alone is a sufficient articulated reason to reorder the shared index table by the Doppler/wrong-timing attribute; together they make the combination not merely obvious but the natural engineering step, and indeed the step 3GPP actually took.

Reasonable expectation of success is documented, not assumed: PA-2 reports measured/derived maximum-supportable-radius curves by index (its Figures 2 and 4), and ND1's standardized table embodies the result.

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VIII. Claim-by-claim disposition

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IX. Weaknesses, counterarguments, and flagged contradictions

A. Contradiction with the earlier-generated section. That section characterized the granted claims as mapping to Embodiment 6 ("most relevant to the granted claims — ordering the table by high-speed/Doppler behavior") and described the earlier embodiments as less relevant. I agree with that mapping. What that section did not surface is the consequence: Embodiment 6 is the embodiment for which the richest pre-2007-date prior art exists, because the ordering-by-Doppler property was the subject of an active, publicly documented 3GPP debate in January–March 2007, including two contributions by the applicant itself. The earlier section's litigation-related caution (that no case asserting this patent was confirmed) is unaffected by anything here, and I do not contradict it.

B. The "by others" / self-disclosure problem (Ground 1 only). Both PA-1 and PA-2 are Panasonic + NTT DoCoMo contributions. Four of the five named inventors are Panasonic personnel (Imamura, Iwai, Inogai, Futagi, Matsumoto). Under pre-AIA § 102(a), a reference is prior art only if it is "by others"; a joint Panasonic–NTT DoCoMo contribution is not wholly the inventors' own work, but a patentee could argue the Panasonic portions are not "by others," and could attempt a 37 CFR 1.131 swear-behind. Mitigation: Ground 2 is built entirely on ND1 (applicant-admitted) + Nokia (PA-3) + LG (PA-4) + Motorola (PA-5), none of which has the authorship problem. Ground 3 is built on LG (R1-073595, R1-073501), Huawei, and the standards text. The obviousness case therefore does not stand or fall on the Panasonic references.

C. Argument that PA-3 does not use "an arrangement." PA-3 frames availability as a per-index determination ("some base sequence indexes u are forbidden") rather than as a sorted table. A patentee would argue PA-3 teaches exclusion, not ordering. Response: PA-2 and EP 3 220 562 B1 both supply the ordering step expressly, and claim 1 does not require any particular data structure — "an arrangement" reads on any ordered set, including the standardized logical root sequence order of ND1.

D. "Generally increase"/"generally decrease" is a term of degree. The claims use "generally," which under Datamize v. Plumtree invites a § 112 indefiniteness challenge and, for § 103 purposes, means the patentee cannot escape a broad reading. PA-2's interleaved pattern satisfies any reasonable construction; the '839 specification's own ±1…±18, ∓18…∓1 table is the identical pattern.

E. No objective indicia on this record. There is no evidence of unexpected results, long-felt need, or industry praise tied to the ordering. The patent's own specification reports no comparative data for Embodiment 6 — only the assertion that "it is possible to report only usable sequence allocations in a non-wasteful manner." Conversely, the adoption of the corresponding arrangement into TS 36.211 could be argued as industry recognition, but adoption of a standardized table is as consistent with obviousness as with invention (and here at least three separate companies — Panasonic, LG, Huawei, Nokia — proposed variants in the same window, which is itself evidence of obviousness: In re Merck; Dystar).

F. Priority-date attack is untested. As stated in §I, I could not verify whether the 2007-03-19 priority document contains the Embodiment-6 disclosure. This is the single highest-value issue for a challenger, because it converts Ground 3 from "obviousness" to near-anticipation by TS 36.211 v8.1.0/v8.2.0 plus R1-071408.

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X. Conclusion

Claims 1 and 9 of U.S. 9,736,839 are, on the prior art retrieved, at least obvious and quite possibly anticipated.

• The strongest § 103 combination is Panasonic/NTT DoCoMo R1-070189 (complexity-driven (a, K−a) pairing) in view of "RACH sequence allocation and indication to the cell" (ordering by maximum supportable cell radius for high-mobility cells, plus indication to the cell), with TS 36.211 V1.0.0 and Nokia's high-Doppler restricted-set contribution supplying the "wrong-timing correlation position" mechanism and the consecutive-index broadcast mechanism. Every element of claims 1 and 9 has a documented pre-2007-03-19 home.
• The strongest authorship-independent combination is TS 36.211 V1.0.0 (admitted prior art) + Nokia high-Doppler restricted sets + LG R1-070227 / Motorola.
• If the claims are not entitled to the 2007-03-19 priority date, LG R1-073595/R1-073501 + EP 3 220 562 B1's disclosed ordering schemes + TS 36.211 v8.1.0/v8.2.0 make the case substantially stronger, approaching anticipation.
• The dependent claims add nothing: each recites either a conceded implementation detail (cyclic-shift amount reporting, integrated circuit, antenna) or a mathematical property that follows directly from the interleaved ordering (middle-value concentration, extremes-at-ends).

Residual uncertainty I cannot resolve from the sources retrieved: (i) the contents of the 2007-03-19 priority document; (ii) the exact document number and date of the Nokia high-Doppler contribution and of the Panasonic/NTT DoCoMo "RACH sequence allocation and indication to the cell" contribution; (iii) whether any claim beyond claim 15 exists (as flagged in the earlier section); and (iv) whether the "family has litigation" flag on Google Patents (Darts-IP family 39875331) covers the assertion of this patent.