US 10337970

I'll search for this specific patent number and any related docket activity.

The generic searches returned unrelated "'379" patents. Let me run more targeted queries.

Let me try more precise queries for the patent record and any court activity.

Summary: US 10,337,970 B2

Important caveat on your request first: I ran targeted searches for this exact number. I could not find any U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) docket, appeal, or any litigation involving US 10,337,970 in 2026 (or any year). No CAFC opinion, order, or docket entry referencing this patent surfaced. I also could not pull a live USPTO PatentCenter record directly; the bibliographic data below comes from the Google Patents record for US10337970B2 (which is sourced from USPTO data) plus a reproduction of the published application. Treat the court-docket portion as "no evidence found," not as proof of absence — my search coverage is not guaranteed exhaustive.

Also note: generic searches for "10337970" returned multiple unrelated items (e.g., a German priority number 10337970.3, and various "'379 patents" such as Ethicon's and a memory-controller patent). I did not confuse these with the patent you asked about.

Bibliographic data (from the patent record)

Abstract

An apparatus and method for in-situ testing impact strength of a micro-structure. The apparatus includes a flexible beam with one fixed end; an impact mass block at the other end of the flexible beam that exerts an impact on the micro-structure; and a locking member having a beam arm and a plurality of locking teeth. The beam arm is perpendicular to the flexible beam and has one fixed end, and the locking teeth are distributed at intervals along the beam arm, so that the other end of the flexible beam engages one of the locking teeth when the flexible beam is loaded.

Independent claims (plain language)

Claim 1 — Apparatus (independent). A device for testing how much impact a micro-structure can take, made of three parts:

• a flexible beam fixed at one end (a cantilever);
• an impact mass block on the free end of the beam that strikes the micro-structure; and
• a locking member = a beam arm (fixed at one end, oriented perpendicular to the flexible beam) carrying multiple locking teeth spaced along it.
  When the flexible beam is bent/loaded, its free end latches into one of those teeth, holding it in a loaded (cocked) position until released. Different teeth = different stored deflection/energy.

Claim 8 — Method (independent, uses the apparatus of claim 1). A testing procedure:

• (a) fix the micro-structure so it faces the impact mass block;
• (b) load the flexible beam so its free end engages the nearest locking tooth;
• (c) release the beam so the mass block impacts the micro-structure;
• (d) repeat (b) and (c) step-by-step through successively farther teeth (increasing load) until the micro-structure is damaged; and
• (e) record which locking tooth was engaged at failure, convert that to a load-deflection, and derive the corresponding impact strength.

Dependent claims (for completeness)

• 2 & 9: fabrication by silicon-on-glass (SOG) bonding bulk-silicon process — the micro-structure, test apparatus, and a functional device are patterned in the same photolithography step and released in the same etch, so the test sample is process-matched to the real device.
• 3: locking teeth spaced along the beam arm from its free end, with tooth lengths decreasing by an equal amount.
• 4 & 14/15/16/17: add a first probe to push the beam arm to load/release the flexible beam.
• 5: add a second probe to push the flexible beam into engagement with a tooth.
• 6: impact mass block sized substantially the same as the micro-structure.
• 7: one end of the impact mass block is arc-shaped (as in Figs. 1–2).
• 10, 11, 18, 19: method steps performed via the first/second probes.
• 12 & 20: step (e) performed by feeding the load-deflection into a mechanical (FEA) model of the apparatus and obtaining the instantaneous impact acceleration (the description specifies ANSYS/LS-DYNA).

Worked example in the specification

Micro-structure: single tooth, 20 µm wide × 40 µm long. Impact mass block: ~40 µm × 30 µm cube with one arc-shaped side. Flexible beam: 700 µm long × 10 µm wide (designed for ~10–20 m/s impact speed). Locking teeth spaced 10 µm apart. Failure occurred at the 20th locking tooth (load-deflection 200 µm), yielding a reported impact strength of 1.25 GPa for the tested micro-structure.

Cited prior art on the face of the patent

11 cited references (e.g., US 4,139,814; US 2002/0189357 A1; JP 2005-207873 A; CN 1936535 A; US 2009/0145230 A1; US 2012/0243004 A1; CN 104330236 A) and 2 non-patent citations (Extended European Search Report for EP 15893756.5; International Search Report for PCT/CN2015/080872).

Uncertainties / limitations to flag

• No litigation or CAFC activity located. My searches found no Federal Circuit docket, IPR, or district court case for US 10,337,970. If you need certainty, this should be verified against PACER/Docket Navigator and the CAFC docket system directly, which I could not query here.
• Filing date nuance: the record shows 2015-06-05 as the filing/priority date because the U.S. case is a national-stage entry of the 2015 PCT; the U.S. national-stage (371) entry itself occurred in December 2017.
• The legal-status and assignee statements are the patent office's/Google's listings and are not a legal conclusion.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 10337970 across patent litigation databases.

Initial results returned an unrelated German application number (10337970.3), not US patent 10,337,970. Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me try more specific sources, including Google Patents litigation data and free patent litigation databases.

Litigation Search Report — US Patent No. 10,337,970

Patent identified: US 10,337,970 B2 — "Apparatus and method for in-situ testing impact strength of micro-structure"

• Application No. US 15/579,397; PCT/CN2015/080872 (WO 2016192100 A1)
• Assignee: Peking University
• Priority/filing date: 2015-06-05; Granted: 2019-07-02
• Subject matter: a MEMS/SOG-bonded micro-structure impact-strength test apparatus (flexible beam, impact mass block, locking member with locking teeth)

Finding: No litigation located

Based on my searches of patent-litigation resources (Unified Patents litigation portal, PTAB/CAFC-related materials, general litigation reporting, and Google Patents' own "Litigation" data), I found no record of any litigation — district court, ITC Section 337, PTAB, or CAFC appeal — involving US 10,337,970.

Because no case exists to report, I cannot provide plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome/status. I am stating this explicitly rather than assembling a table of fields that would have no grounding.

Notes on search reliability and a false positive

1. A same-numbered identifier appeared, but it is NOT this patent. A search hit for the bare string "10337970" returned German application DE 10337970.3 (JP 4516077 B2 family), owned by GKS Forschungszentrum Geesthacht GmbH, titled "metal-containing hydrogen storage material" (金属含有水素貯蔵材料). This is an unrelated German application number — it is not US 10,337,970 and should not be treated as an association. Under the strict instruction to interpret identifiers literally, this is a distinct identifier and is not evidence of any US patent activity.

2. Context suggesting low litigation likelihood (not proof). US 10,337,970 is a research/industrial metrology apparatus held by a university (Peking University) in the MEMS testing field. It is exercised via the SOG bulk-silicon process, its family covers US/EP/WO, and Google Patents shows only forward citation activity (e.g., CN119492609B) and cited references — no litigation events. None of this is affirmative proof of "no litigation," but nothing in the record indicates enforcement activity.

3. Search limitations. My tool access to the specific litigation sites (e.g., portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/..., PACER, CAFC dockets) returned no matching docket entries within the searches performed, and one search batch was truncated by a step limit. I therefore cannot rule out a filing that is (a) very recent, (b) not yet indexed by the free databases searched, or (c) sealed/unpublished. I did not find any such filing, however.

Recommended verification steps (if a definitive negative is needed)

• Unified Patents litigation portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (filter by patent number 10337970)
• USPTO Patent Public Search / Patent Center "Litigation" and "Assignment" tabs for 10,337,970
• PACER (all district courts) and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit docket, using the literal number 10337970
• Google Patents → US10337970B2 → "Litigation" / "Similar Documents" sections
• Darts-ip / Lex Machina (commercial) for worldwide assertion data

Bottom line: No litigation is known for US Patent 10,337,970 on the basis of available information. The only "10337970" hit surfaced was German application 10337970.3, which is a different, unrelated identifier.

I'll start by verifying the structured "no proceedings" default against live sources, since the ODP ingest can lag.

The first search returned an unrelated patent (the '379 memory-controller patent). Let me search more precisely for this patent and its family.

No PTAB hits yet. Let me run a few more targeted checks to be thorough before concluding.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: zero. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block from the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for US 10,337,970, and my independent web screening (PTAB-related searches on the patent number, its application number 15/579,397, its publication US2018/0149568A1, and its family members WO2016/192100A1 / EP3306298B1) surfaced no AIA trial petition, institution decision, FWD, or appeal naming this patent. The breakdown is therefore 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied. Defensive posture: this is the opposite of a "hardened patent" — it is an untested patent. All 20 claims stand exactly as issued, and a defendant gets no free ride from a prior Board ruling; the entire invalidity fight is still on the table and can be fought from scratch (in court, at the PTAB, or both).

Screening note: Web searches for the string "379 patent" and "10,331,379" return a large volume of IPR materials (e.g., Silicon Motion Inc. v. K.Mizra LLC, IPR2024-01236; Unified Patents v. Velos Media, IPR2019-00707). Those concern U.S. Patent No. 10,331,379 — a memory-controller patent — a different patent number that is a near-transposition of 10,337,970. I have excluded all of that material. No proceeding of any kind was located that names 10,337,970.

(No proceedings to list)

There are no proceeding numbers to report. Per your instruction not to invent proceeding numbers, I am leaving this section empty rather than populating it with look-alike case numbers from the unrelated '379 memory patent.

Strategic summary

Claim status: 1–20 all SUSTAINED (never challenged), 0 CANCELED, 20 UNTESTED. Because no AIA trial was ever instituted, no claim of 10,337,970 has been canceled, narrowed, or confirmed by the Board. Claim 1 (the apparatus: flexible beam with fixed end, impact mass block at the free end, and a perpendicular locking member with spaced locking teeth) and claim 8 (the method of using that apparatus) are the two independent claims of interest; claims 2–7 depend from claim 1 and claims 9–20 depend from claim 8. Every one of them remains presumptively valid and enforceable under 35 U.S.C. § 282(a).

Estoppel landscape: none exists. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to a petitioner that obtains an instituted IPR and reaches a final written decision. Since nothing was instituted, no party is estopped from raising any § 102 or § 103 ground, and there is no prior Board claim-construction ruling that binds anyone under Finar / Novartis in a later district-court case. Practically, this means a defendant's freedom to pick art is unconstrained by any prior PTAB record — but so is the patent owner's, and there is no adverse FWD to lean on either. The one soft signal worth noting: the prosecution record does show a relatively thin prior-art citation set (11 references, mostly mechanical impact-testing devices plus a membrane/microstructure metrology reference like US 2002/0189357 and US 2012/0243004), which historically correlates with patents that are vulnerable to a well-constructed IPR — the absence of a challenge is not evidence of strength.

Pattern signals: essentially none, which is itself the story. There is no repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents or similar entity) in the chain, and no Federal Circuit appeal, because there has been no proceeding to appeal. The patent's prosecution and post-grant footprint is ordinary: a single family (WO/EP/US) filed 2015-06-05 off PCT/CN2015/080872, granted 2019-07-02, with the 4th-year maintenance fee paid 2022-12-26 (small entity). Notably, the patent has drawn no known assertion campaign in the US — no litigation surfaced in my searches — which is the most likely explanation for why no IPR was ever filed: IPRs follow demand letters and lawsuits, and well-asserted patents eventually attract them. The family's only foreign invalidity activity I could infer is at the EPO (EP3306298B1 granted 2020-12-30), but that is not an AIA proceeding and I have not confirmed whether an EPO opposition was filed — I could not verify that with high confidence.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and the patent owner's demand letter cites claims 1–20: there is no PTAB FWD to cite, because none exists. Do not represent otherwise to a court or opposing counsel. Your grounds must be developed independently; you cannot piggyback on any prior Board ruling, and you should not assume the patent is strong merely because it is un-challenged.
• Consider filing an IPR/PGR yourself if you have strong art. Because no prior petition exists, you face no § 315(e)(2) estoppel from anyone else and no risk that a prior final decision already blessed these claims. The main timing cautions: (i) the § 315(b) one-year bar runs from service of a complaint alleging infringement, so move promptly; and (ii) under § 314(a)/(Fintiv-style) discretionary-denial practice, a parallel district-court trial date can counsel for or against institution. There is no prior art-unit or panel history on this patent to predict from.
• Verification step I could not complete: I was unable to run the ODP API directly or retrieve a definitive PTAB E2E docket page for 10,337,970 within this session. Before relying on the "zero proceedings" conclusion in a filing, confirm it at the PTAB E2E / PTAB Decisions portals and via the ODP proceeding endpoint, and separately confirm whether an EPO opposition to EP3306298B1 is pending (an adverse EPO outcome would be persuasive-but-not-binding § 282/§ 103 evidence in the US).
• If you find a proceeding I missed, the correct home for the full write-up is PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/) for papers and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/) for any CAFC appeal — none of the above should be quoted as a final decision without pulling the underlying paper.

I'll research the assignment record for US 10,337,970, cross-referencing the authoritative patent text I've been given with available sources.

Let me try to reach the assignment record directly and check for any later transfers.

Let me try to retrieve the actual assignment document to capture the correspondent of record.

I've reached the research limit. Below is the assignment-ownership reconstruction based on the authoritative patent text (Google Patents legal events) and the searches completed. Where a data point (notably the recording correspondent) was not retrievable, I say so rather than invent it.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US Patent No. 10,337,970 B2

Patent: US 10,337,970 B2 — "Apparatus and method for in-situ testing impact strength of micro-structure"
Application: US 15/579,397 (PCT/CN2015/080872 national phase; WO 2016192100 A1)
Filing / priority: 2015-06-05 · Granted: 2019-07-02 · Current assignee: Peking University

Data note: The Google Patents legal-events record for this patent is fully populated and provides the reel/frame of the sole assignment. I was not able to retrieve the underlying USPTO assignment document image, so the correspondent of record (the recording attorney/firm) is not determinable from the sources available to me. I flag this explicitly rather than guessing. Everything else below is drawn from the authoritative record.

Inventors

Eight named inventors, all on the US national-phase application:

Note on employer: The PCT applicant and sole assignee of record is Peking University, and all eight inventors are the assignors on the 2017 assignment to Peking University (reel 044908/0064). This corroborates that the inventors were Peking University personnel (the work is university MEMS metrology research — an SOG bulk-silicon on-chip test apparatus). Their specific institutes/labs are not stated in the record I can access and I will not invent them.

Unusual-pattern check — negative. There is no evidence of inventors departing the assignee within 12 months of filing. The only inventor-related event is the opposite: all eight inventors assigned their rights to the university (executed 2017-12-14). The timing is administrative, not a precursor to a fire-sale — see below.

Original assignee

Peking University (Beijing, China) is named on the issued patent and remains the current assignee.

• Primary line of business: Public research university; the relevant activity is academic MEMS/microelectronics R&D (Institute of Microelectronics / micro/nano fabrication).
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? No. This is a research-metrology apparatus (an on-chip micro-structure impact-strength test rig fabricated by the standard silicon-on-glass bonding bulk-silicon process). It is an instrument/method used to characterize MEMS device structures, not a commercial product sold by the assignee.
• Current status: Operating (fully active institution). The patent is live — a 4th-year maintenance fee was paid 2022-12-26 (small entity), and the anticipated expiry is 2035-06-05.

Assignment timeline

Only one assignment is recorded for this patent. It is an inventors → original-applicant perfecting assignment, not a post-issuance transfer.

• 2017-12-14 (executed) / recorded 2017-12-19 — Reel 044908 / Frame 0064
  • Conveyance: Assignment (AS — "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST")
  • Assignors (conveying parties): Li Zhang; Dacheng Zhang; Fang Yang; Wei Wang; Dayu Tian; Peng Liu; Ting Li; Kui Luo (all eight named inventors)
  • Assignee (receiving party): PEKING UNIVERSITY, China
  • Correspondent: Not determinable from available sources. The legal-events record exposes the reel/frame but not the recording attorney/firm; I did not retrieve the assignment document image. No recurrence flag is possible.
  • Context: Internal / administrative — perfecting the chain of title from the inventors to the university, executed just before/at US national-phase entry (application 15/579,397). This mirrors the Google Patents "Application filed by Peking University" event and is routine for a Chinese-origin PCT entering the US. Not a fire-sale, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

No further assignments, security agreements, name changes, licenses, or releases are recorded. Google Patents lists only this one AS event; there is no ASG, SEC, MERGER, CHANGE OF NAME, or RELEASE entry after it. Forward-citation activity is limited to a 2024 Peking University application (CN119492609B) in the same in-situ impact-strength field — i.e., the university is still adding to the portfolio, not divesting it.

Cross-reference: The earlier litigation section of this analysis found no litigation (district court, ITC, PTAB, or CAFC) involving this patent. That is consistent with the ownership picture: a university research asset, never asserted.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10337970
    2015 : PCT filed by Peking University
    2017 : Inventors assign rights to Peking University
    2019 : US 10337970 granted
    2022 : Fourth year maintenance fee paid

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Aggregate: zero affirmative NPE signals. One signal (repeat correspondent) is unresolved for lack of the recording-document data.

Verdict

Insufficient data (only the original assignment is recorded).

The USPTO record contains a single conveyance — inventors → Peking University, executed 2017-12-14 and recorded 2017-12-19 at reel 044908/0064 — which is the standard title-perfecting step for a Chinese-origin PCT at US national-phase entry. There is no transfer to a licensing LLC, no known asserter, no cascading chain, no bankruptcy, and no litigation, and the university continues to build in this field (forward citation CN119492609B, 2024). On the merits this is a university-held, non-asserting research asset, but because the rubric's "Insufficient data" bucket expressly covers the "only the original assignment" case — and because I could not retrieve the recording correspondent to fully close out signal #3 — that is the correct formal verdict. No NPE characterization is supported, and I am not inferring one.

Verify at: USPTO Patent Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 10337970; the legacy index at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html surfaces the same reel 044908/0064 record). The underlying record image is the only place the correspondent of record will appear, and retrieving it is the one remaining gap in this analysis.

I'll run targeted searches on the patent and its cited references.

Let me search for the remaining cited references to characterize each.

Prior-Art Analysis for US Patent No. 10,337,970 B2

1. Patent identification (USPTO record)

I located the record for the specific number requested. I did not find a direct hit through a native USPTO Patent Public Search interface (my tools query web/patent aggregators that mirror USPTO data); the authoritative record I could retrieve is the Google Patents reproduction of the USPTO grant:

• US 10,337,970 B2 — "Apparatus and method for in-situ testing impact strength of micro-structure"
• Application US 15/579,397; PCT PCT/CN2015/080872 (WO 2016/192100 A1); pre-grant pub. US 2018/0149568 A1
• Assignee: Peking University; Priority/filing 2015-06-05; Granted 2019-07-02
• Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10337970/en

Literal-identifier discipline / false positives excluded. I did not substitute any of the following for US 10,337,970, as they are distinct identifiers:

• DE 10337970.3 (a German application number, "metal-containing hydrogen storage material" — GKS Forschungszentrum Geesthacht) — unrelated.
• Third-party inventor-leaderboard pages (patentleaderboard.com) that list "10337970" under Foxconn and ABB Research profiles (e.g., https://www.patentleaderboard.com/hon-hai-precision-industry-co/li-quan-zhang/[1012797](/patent/1012797)). This is a miscategorization by that third-party site: the title and all eight inventors match the Peking University patent exactly; only the assignee field is wrong there. It is the same patent, not a different one.

2. The prior art cited on the face of US 10,337,970

The patent lists 11 patent citations and 2 non-patent citations. Four of the patent citations are flagged (with an asterisk) by Google Patents as "cited by examiner": US 4,139,814 A; US 2002/0189357 A1; US 2009/0145230 A1; US 2012/0243004 A1. The rest are third-party/other citations.

The sections below give, per reference: full citation, dates, brief description, and the § 102 analysis.

R1 — GB 190,825,470 A (Walter Longland)

• Title: "Improvements in and relating to Machines for Testing the Strength of Materials by Impact"
• Filing/priority: 1908-11-26; Publication: 1909-11-18
• Description: An early machine for testing the strength of materials by applying an impact (impact/drop-type materials testing).
• § 102 relevance: None as anticipation. It is an 1909-era macroscopic impact-testing machine; it discloses no micro-structure, no silicon/MEMS context, no flexible-beam cantilever, no impact mass block at a beam tip, and no beam arm with spaced locking teeth for incremental cocking/release. It cannot anticipate claim 1 or claim 8, nor any dependent claim. It is background art for the general concept of "impact strength testing."

R2 — US 4,139,814 A (Continental Oil Company) — cited by examiner

• Title: "Method of detecting corrosion at interface of concrete and reinforcing steel using a hydrogen probe imbedded in the concrete"
• Filing: 1977-02-22; Publication: 1979-02-13
• Description: Electrochemical/corrosion sensing in reinforced concrete via an embedded hydrogen probe.
• § 102 relevance: None. Different technical field (civil-engineering corrosion monitoring). Discloses no impact testing, no micro-structure, and none of the claimed structure. Cannot anticipate any claim.

R3 — JP S56-21478 A (Fujitsu Ltd.)

• Title: "Optical information reader"
• Filing: 1979-07-30; Publication: 1981-02-27
• Description: An optical (barcode/character) information reader.
• § 102 relevance: None. Unrelated field; no impact testing and none of the claimed elements.

R4 — ES 2,176,090 A1 (Instituto de las Ind. Cerámicas / A)

• Title: "Device and procedure for evaluating the resistance to the impact of fragile objects"
• Filing: 2000-07-13; Publication: 2002-11-16
• Description: A device and method for evaluating the impact resistance of fragile objects (e.g., ceramic articles).
• § 102 relevance: Partial subject-matter overlap only at the genus level ("impact resistance of fragile objects"). It does not disclose the claimed combination — a flexible beam fixed at one end with an impact mass block at its free end, plus a beam arm perpendicular to the beam carrying a plurality of spaced locking teeth that latch the loaded beam. Cannot anticipate claims 1 or 8; at most a § 103 background reference.

R5 — US 2002/0189357 A1 (Computed Ultrasound Global Inc.) — cited by examiner → granted as US 6,595,058 B2

• Title: "Method and apparatus for determining dynamic response of microstructure by using pulsed broad bandwidth ultrasonic transducer as BAW hammer"
• Filing: 2001-06-19; Publication: 2002-12-19; Grant: 2003-07-22
• Description (verified): A piezocomposite ultrasonic transducer generates a pulsed bulk acoustic wave (BAW) hammer to excite a microstructure; free vibration is detected with a laser Doppler vibrometer and displayed on an oscilloscope to obtain resonant frequency, mode shape, damping, Young's modulus, etc. It explicitly touts suitability for on-line tests for batch production. Inventors: Wen-Pin Lai, Weileun Fang, et al.
• § 102 relevance: This is the closest cited art in subject matter (microstructure mechanical/dynamic testing, on-line/batch characterization), but it does not anticipate. Key differences: (i) excitation is by acoustic bulk waves from a transducer to which the sample is attached, not by a mechanical impact mass block on a swinging flexible beam; (ii) there is no flexible beam, no impact mass block, and no locking member with beam arm + spaced locking teeth; (iii) it measures dynamic response (resonance/mode shape), not impact strength / failure. Cannot anticipate claim 1 or 8; useful only as § 103 context. (Verified via https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6595058B2](/patent/US6595058B2)/en)

R6 — JP 2005-207873 A (Fujitsu Ltd.)

• Title: "Impact test equipment"
• Filing: 2004-01-22; Publication: 2005-08-04
• Description: Impact test equipment (general mechanical impact testing).
• § 102 relevance: None as anticipation of the claimed micro-structure apparatus/method. General impact-testing equipment; no micro-structure-on-wafer context and none of the specific claimed elements (locking-teeth cocking mechanism).

R7 — CN 1936535 A (Shanghai Haoshu Technology Co., Ltd. — 上海浩顺科技有限公司)

• Title: "1-D impaction strength testing device" (一维冲击强度测试装置)
• Filing: 2005-12-07; Publication: 2007-03-28
• Description: A one-dimensional impact-strength testing device.
• § 102 relevance: General impact-strength testing; does not disclose the flexible-beam/impact-mass-block/locking-teeth combination, nor the tooth-by-tooth incremental loading method of claim 8.

R8 — US 2009/0145230 A1 (Tokyo Electron Limited) — cited by examiner → granted as US 8,141,426 B2

• Title: "Displacement Measurement apparatus for microstructure and displacement measurement method thereof"
• Filing: 2007-12-05; Publication: 2009-06-11
• Description (verified): On-wafer measurement of a MEMS microstructure's displacement using electrostatic bias signals and capacitance-based detection between fixed and movable electrodes (with noise cancellation); avoids external mechanical displacement sources. Provided to enable accurate on-wafer characterization.
• § 102 relevance: Same general domain (MEMS/microstructure characterization on a wafer) but a different physical principle (electrostatic/capacitive actuation and sensing), and it does not measure impact strength and does not disclose a flexible beam + impact mass block + locking teeth. Cannot anticipate claims 1 or 8. The examiner's citation likely reflects the general "on-line/on-wafer testing of microstructures" context.

R9 — US 2012/0243004 A1 (Technische Universiteit Delft) — cited by examiner

• Title: "Method and Apparatus for Determining Structure Parameters of Microstructures"
• Inventors: Omar El Gawhary; Stefan Petra; Filing: 2011-03-21; Publication: 2012-09-27
• Description (verified): Optical scatterometry — illuminating a target with coherent radiation, measuring diffraction-intensity patterns, retrieving phase, and modeling to determine geometric structure parameters (CD, overlay) of semiconductor microstructures. It is lithography-metrology art, not mechanical testing.
• § 102 relevance: Essentially none. The only overlap is the word "microstructure"; the reference concerns optical/diffraction metrology of semiconductor structures, with no impact, no flexible beam, no mass block, no locking teeth. It cannot anticipate any claim. Its inclusion among the examiner-cited references is likely for generic background on "microstructures"/parameter determination.

R10 — JP 5621478 B2 (JFE Steel Corporation — Ｊｆｅスチール株式会社)

• Title (as listed): "High toughness and high deformation steel plate for high strength steel pipe and method for producing the same"
• Dates: 2010-09-29 → 2014-11-12
• Description: A metallurgical/steel-plate composition-and-processing reference.
• § 102 relevance: None. Unrelated field (steel metallurgy).
• ⚠ Flag (data-integrity): The citation list also contains "JPS5621478A" attributed to Fujitsu Ltd., "Optical information reader," 1979/1981 (R3). Two different references both carry the number "5621478" (one as a JP A publication, one as a JP B2 registration). This is a metadata anomaly/possible mismatch in the aggregator's citation listing. Under the literal-identifier rule I am reporting both as listed, without auto-correcting either. This does not affect the substantive conclusion (neither anticipates).

R11 — CN 104330236 A (Ocean's King (Dongguan) Lighting Technology Co., Ltd. — 海洋王（东莞）照明科技有限公司)

• Title: "Impact strength detection device" (冲击强度检测装置)
• Inventors: 周明杰; 胡波; App. no.: CN 201310309743.2; Filing: 2013-07-22; Publication: 2015-02-04; Status: withdrawn 2017-03-08
• Description (verified): A device to test the impact strength of the pulling/drawing member of a fixed lighting product: a fixing frame holds one end of the pulling member; the other end connects to a simulated (dummy) mass; a control circuit with a lifting member and drive sequentially lifts the dummy mass to a first position and then releases it so it free-falls to stretch the pulling member and impart a preset impact.
• § 102 relevance: General impact-strength testing with a gravity/drop mechanism. It does disclose a controlled single-load-then-release concept, but it is macroscopic, unrelated to micro-structures, and lacks every claimed structural element (flexible beam cantilever, tip impact mass block, perpendicular beam arm with a plurality of locking teeth enabling incremental, quantized loading). Cannot anticipate claims 1 or 8, nor the tooth-by-tooth methodology.

Non-patent citations (prosecution documents, not prior art)

• Extended European Search Report, EP 15893756.5, dated 2019-01-22 (7 pp.)
• International Search Report, PCT/CN2015/080872, dated 2016-03-10 (4 pp.)

These are search/prosecution products, not printed publications usable as § 102 prior art in their own right.

3. Anticipation (35 U.S.C. § 102) — overall finding

No cited reference anticipates any claim of US 10,337,970. The claimed advance is the specific architecture that (i) stores test energy in a fixed-end flexible beam with a tip impact mass block, (ii) holds it in a cocked position via a beam arm perpendicular to the beam bearing a plurality of spaced locking teeth, and (iii) is operated by the stepwise, nearest-to-farthest tooth engagement/release method (claim 8) until the micro-structure fails, with failure position → load-deflection → impact strength. None of the 11 cited references discloses that combination:

• Relative relevance ranking (most → least): US 2002/0189357 A1 (microstructure dynamic testing, on-line/batch) > US 2009/0145230 A1 (on-wafer MEMS testing) > CN 104330236 A and ES 2,176,090 A1 (impact-strength testing generally) > US 2012/0243004 A1 (only "microstructure" in common) > the remaining purely unrelated references.
• If the question is obviousness (§ 103) rather than anticipation, the strongest combination an examiner might attempt is US 2002/0189357 A1 (microstructure mechanical characterization / on-line testing) combined with a macroscopic impact-tester reference (e.g., CN 104330236 A or ES 2,176,090 A1) — but neither supplies the claimed beam-arm-with-locking-teeth incrementally-cocked cantilever, so even a combination does not reach the independent claims on the art of record. Any § 103 theory would need art outside this citation list.

4. Contradictions / caveats to flag

1. No direct live USPTO query. I could not run a native USPTO Patent Public Search/Patent Center query; bibliographic facts and the citation list are from the Google Patents record (mirrors USPTO data). The patent number itself, title, assignee, dates, and the 11-reference citation list are consistent across sources I retrieved.
2. Third-party assignee error (not a contradiction of the patent): patentleaderboard.com attributes this exact patent (matching title + all inventors) to Foxconn/ABB Research. Per the rule not to auto-correct, I flag it as an aggregator error rather than "correct" it, and note it is not a separate patent.
3. Possible number collision in the citation list: both "JPS5621478A" (Fujitsu, 1981) and "JP5621478B2" (JFE Steel, 2014) appear with the same numeric stem "5621478." Reported as listed; substantive conclusion unaffected.
4. Marking convention: Asterisks (*) in the Google Patents citation table denote "cited by examiner" (US 4,139,814; US 2002/0189357; US 2009/0145230; US 2012/0243004); the others are not examiner-flagged. This is a metadata convention, not a legal conclusion about materiality.

5. Bottom line

For US 10,337,970, the most relevant cited prior art is US 2002/0189357 A1 (granted US 6,595,058 B2), followed by US 2009/0145230 A1 (US 8,141,426 B2) for on-wafer MEMS testing and by CN 104330236 A / ES 2,176,090 A1 for impact-strength testing generally. None of the 11 cited references anticipates any claim under 35 U.S.C. § 102; several are unrelated on their face (US 4,139,814; JP S56-21478; JP 5621478 B2). The patent's novelty/non-obviousness rests on the locking-member architecture (perpendicular beam arm with a plurality of spacing locking teeth that latch and sequentially release the loaded flexible beam) and the corresponding incremental tooth-by-tooth test method — a combination not disclosed by any reference on the face of the patent.

Limitation: my adverse-search coverage is not provably exhaustive; a definitive § 102/§ 103 position would require the examiner's actual cited-art markings and any IDS references in the file wrapper, which I could not pull directly from Patent Center here.

I'll ground this obviousness analysis in the prior art actually cited on the face of US 10,337,970. Let me pull the key references first.

Obviousness Analysis — US 10,337,970 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Builds on: the patent summary and litigation sections already generated. This section uses the prior-art references that appear in the "Citations / Patent Citations" and "Non-Patent Citations" blocks of the Google Patents record for US10337970B2 (source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10337970B2/en). It does not repeat the bibliographic/claim text.

0. Scope, caveats, and legal framework

Legal standard. A claim is invalid under § 103 if the differences between it and the prior art "are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art." Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) sets the four factual inquiries (scope/content of prior art; differences; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations). KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) supplies the combination logic: a combination of known elements is obvious where it does no more than yield predictable results, responds to a known design need or market pressure, or uses a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way. Teaching-suggestion-motivation is one permissible route, not the only one.

The critical date is 2015-06-05 (PCT/filing/priority). Every reference cited on the face of the patent predates it by decades, so all are available as § 102(a)/(b) art and as § 103 art.

Evidence limitation (important — read before using this). I have the reference titles and abstracts from the citation list plus live text for four of them (US 6,595,058 B2 [the published version of US 2002/0189357 A1], CN 1936535 A, ES 2176090 A1, CN 104330236 A). For the remainder I have only the citation metadata. Where I rely on a reference's actual disclosure I say so; where I rely on a title/field inference I flag it as such. No § 103 conclusion here is a substitute for reading the full references, and a real Office action/PTAB analysis would require their complete texts.

A citation-list anomaly to flag. The list contains both JPS5621478A (Fujitsu, "Optical information reader," 1981) and JP5621478B2 (JFE Steel, "High toughness and high deformation steel plate," 2014). These are different documents that happen to share digits; neither concerns impact-strength testing of micro-structures, and they appear to be non-analogous/spurious entries. Under the strict "interpret identifiers literally" rule I treat them as noise, not as § 103 art. Likewise U.S. 4,139,814 (corrosion probe) is off-point.

1. The actual prior-art references and what they teach

2. What claim 1 actually requires vs. the art

Claim 1 is purely structural: (i) a fixed-end flexible beam; (ii) an impact mass block on its free end; (iii) a perpendicular beam arm fixed at one end; (iv) a plurality of locking teeth spaced along the arm that the beam's free end engages when the beam is loaded. The "in-situ" label in the title is not in claim 1's body; it enters only through the fabrication limitation of claim 2/9.

Where the art already sits:

• The cantilever + terminal mass element (i, ii) is a bedrock MEMS building block, and US 6,595,058 expressly treats a micro-cantilever formed on a silicon substrate as the test microstructure — so a PHOSITA working in MEMS testing already had a micro-beam with a terminal body.
• The load-and-release-to-impact concept (ii) is shown by CN 104330236 (a holder releases a mass that falls to deliver a preset impact) and by every drop/pendulum tester on the list.
• The successive-increment-until-failure test philosophy is squarely taught by ES 2176090.

Where the art is thin: the specific "locking member = perpendicular beam arm + plurality of teeth engaged by the beam's free end" (elements iii, iv). None of the cited references, as far as I can verify, discloses a ratchet/pawl-style tooth array being engaged by the free end of a loaded cantilever. That is the narrowest structural distinction, and I treat it below as the pivot of the obviousness question.

3. The obviousness combinations

Combination A — Primary § 103 case for claim 1

US 6,595,058 B2 (microscale on-line microstructure testing) in view of ES 2176090 A1 (incremental repeated-impact-until-damage testing), further in view of CN 104330236 A (hold-and-release preset impact).

• Motivation to combine: US 6,595,058 supplies both the field (impact-type dynamic testing of micro-structures) and the express goal of on-line/batch testing. The patent's own background concedes the known deficiency of conventional drop testing of packaged MEMS ("difficult to test the strength of the device immediately… greatly extending the whole designing process and cycle"). That concession identifies a known problem and thus supplies the KSR "design need" motivation to move the test on-wafer/on-line.
• The incremental-load requirement is the point of ES 2176090: apply successively increasing known-energy impacts to the same specimen until damage, then derive impact resistance. A PHOSITA seeking to quantify a MEMS part's impact strength would naturally adopt that proven test protocol.
• The release mechanism is the point of CN 104330236: hold a mass, then release it to deliver a preset impact. Achieving the ES-2176090 increments with a CN-104330236-style hold/release gives a predictable result — a stepped series of increasing impacts — which is precisely what claim 1's "engaged when loaded" tooth array does.
• Assessment: This combination renders claim 1 obvious if one accepts the perpendicular beam arm carrying a plurality of teeth as a known mechanical expedient (a ratchet/pawl/detent is among the oldest ways to hold a loaded spring at selected displacements — exactly the "familiar element" KSR permits to be supplied by common sense/skill). This is defensible but is also where a patentee would attack: the teeth structure is concrete and arguably not shown in the cited four corners.

Combination B — Method claim 8

Claim 1 apparatus (per Combination A) + ES 2176090 (incremental-until-damage) + routine FEA (claim 12/20).
Steps (a)–(d) are the routine testing loop (fix specimen → load → release → increase load → repeat until failure), and step (e) ("record the tooth position, compute load-deflection, obtain impact strength") is the standard convert-deflection-to-strength step taught by ES 2176090 (damage-proportional parameter → impact resistance) and CN 1936535 (acceleration peak → strength). Substituting a commercially available FEA package (ANSYS/LS-DYNA, named in the spec) to convert deflection to instantaneous acceleration is an unsurprising automation of a known calculation. Claim 8, and its calculation claims 12/20, are likely obvious as a matter of routine test methodology.

Combination C — Fabrication claims 2 & 9 (the strongest non-obviousness feature)

Claims 2/9 require the micro-structure, the test apparatus, and the functional device to be formed in the same photolithography step and released in the same etch (SOG bulk-silicon). US 6,595,058 discloses micro-structures formed on a silicon substrate by a semiconductor manufacturing process and touts on-line testing for batch production — a close motivation to co-fabricate tester and device for process-matching. An attacker can argue that making the test coupon and the tester in the same mask/etch to guarantee matched material/process conditions is an obvious manufacturing choice with a predictable benefit. A patentee can counter that the specific SOG co-fabrication of an impact tester alongside a functional device in the same micro unit is not taught. On the record I have, claims 2/9 are the best candidate for surviving § 103 — but they are also the most fact-dependent, and I cannot resolve them without the full texts of the process-art references.

Dependent claims

• Claim 3 (teeth from the free end, lengths reduced by equal amount): routine design/optimization to define equal energy increments; obvious over an incremental tester once the teeth concept is adopted.
• Claims 4/5, 10/11, 14–19 (first probe to push the arm, second probe to push the beam): the specification itself says the device is "loaded and tested, for example, by probes." Using micro-probes/manipulators to deflect a MEMS cantilever is entirely conventional in MEMS testing (cf. US 2009/0145230, displacement measurement of microstructures). Obvious.
• Claims 6/7 (mass sized like the micro-structure; arc-shaped end): size/shape matching and a rounded contact face are design choices with predictable effect (controlled contact area/impulse), supported by the spec's own statement that the mass "may be changed with the size and shape of the micro-structure." Obvious.

4. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4)

• Long-felt need / failure of others: The background recites that conventional drop testing requires dicing and packaging, is destructive of the whole chip, and cannot reach high peak g / large pulse width. A genuine long-felt need favors non-obviousness if the need was recognized and others failed. Here, however, the need was recognized and the art was already moving on-wafer (US 6,595,058's on-line/batch-testing thrust), which weakens the "failure of others" prong.
• Unexpected results: The spec's own worked example (20 µm × 40 µm tooth; 700 µm × 10 µm beam; failure at the 20th tooth = 200 µm deflection; 1.25 GPa) is presented as a design consequence, not an unexpected result; no comparative data versus the closest art is offered. Weak support for non-obviousness.
• No litigation / no secondary-indicia record. As established in the earlier litigation section, no assertion or litigation was located, so there is no commercial-success or copying evidence in the record to weigh.

5. Bottom line

1. Claims 1 and 8 are the vulnerable claims. A combination of US 6,595,058 B2 (on-line microscale impact/dynamic testing of micro-structures) with ES 2176090 A1 (repeated increasing impacts until damage, then compute impact resistance) and CN 104330236 A (hold-and-release preset impact) supplies the field, the test methodology, and the release mechanism. The remaining structural gap — the perpendicular beam arm with spaced locking teeth engaged by the loaded beam — is most plausibly bridged by treating a ratchet/pawl/detent as a known mechanical expedient under KSR (known element, predictable result), though no cited reference squarely shows it.
2. Claims 12 and 20 (FEA/ANSYS conversion of deflection to instantaneous acceleration) are routine automation of a known calculation and are likely obvious.
3. Claims 2 and 9 (SOG co-fabrication of micro-structure, tester, and functional device in the same lithography/etch) are the strongest non-obviousness position, but are fact-intensive and cannot be resolved on the cited-reference record alone.
4. Weakest link in the rejection / best patentee rebuttal: the specific locking-tooth/beam-arm structure and the co-fabrication limitation are the two elements not clearly evidenced by the cited art; an attacker would probably need one additional reference (a MEMS latching/ratchet mechanism) to make the teeth limitation airtight.

Reliability note: This analysis is grounded in the reference titles/abstracts from the citation list plus full text for US 6,595,058 B2, CN 1936535 A, ES 2176090 A1, and CN 104330236 A. Conclusions about the unverified references are inferences from title/field and are flagged as such; they should be confirmed against full documents before being relied upon. I also note a date discrepancy in the task header ("April 26, 2026") versus the system date (2026-09-29); neither affects the 2015-06-05 critical date governing this § 103 analysis.