US 10408547

Patent Overview — US 10,408,547 B2

Title: Flattened heat pipe and manufacturing method thereof

Patent number / application: US 10,408,547 B2; application US 14/879,821; earlier publication US 2016/0033206 A1

Assignee: Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. (original and current assignee as listed)

Key dates: Priority date 2009-07-21; filing date 2015-10-09; publication date 2019-09-10; adjusted expiration listed as 2030-04-26; legal status listed as Active

Inventors: Hideaki Kameoka, Masanobu Sugimura, Tatsuro Miura, Yasumi Sasaki, Hiroshi Okada, Shinichi Furumoto, Masaaki Yamamoto

Purpose: The patent addresses problems in flattened heat pipes used to cool exothermic parts such as CPUs. Flattening a conventionally fabricated heat pipe can reduce flow-passage area, weaken capillary action, and clog vapor passages, and a strongly flattened pipe may have an indented center that degrades bonding and raises thermal resistance. The stated aim is a flattened heat pipe whose vapor flowing passage is not clogged and which has an excellent capillary force.

Plain-language scope: As described in the excerpt, the flattened heat pipe comprises a flat, tubular, closed container; at least one wick structure; and a sealed working fluid. The wick is a sintered metal of globular or deformed powder. Its cross-section is semi-elliptical, with a flat portion contacting the container inner wall and a curved portion contacting or closely approaching that wall across a gap less than a predetermined distance. Capillary force arises both between the curved portion and the wall and within voids in the sintered metal, and vapor passages form at least in curved side areas of the container. A described manufacturing method inserts a cutaway core rod into the container, fills metal powder into the spaces, heats the container to form sintered metal, pulls out the rod, and flattens the container so the sintered metal lies substantially at center parts.

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10408547/en

What the excerpt does not establish: It is an excerpt only. It does not provide the full claims, the exact predetermined gap distance, all embodiments, the complete manufacturing steps, or any prosecution history. It also does not establish litigation, ownership transfers, or validity. Classification codes and dates are reproduced as listed, without independent verification.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 10408547 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me try more specific litigation-database searches.

Litigation Search Results — US Patent 10,408,547

Patent identified: US 10,408,547 B2, "Flattened heat pipe and manufacturing method thereof," current assignee Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. Application No. 14/879,821 (filed 2015-10-09), granted 2019-09-10, priority date 2009-07-21.

Finding: No litigation known

I was unable to identify any litigation (district court, ITC Section 337, or Federal Circuit appeal) involving US Patent 10,408,547. The patent does not appear to have been asserted in any infringement suit.

Searches performed and what they returned

Important caveats

1. Step limit reached. I exhausted my search budget before completing every targeted query (e.g., a site:portal.unifiedpatents.com search and an exact-format "10,408,547" search did not return results). A negative finding here is therefore indicative but not exhaustive.
2. This is a personally-owned/portfolio-listed patent from a large manufacturing company (Furukawa Electric). Many such patents are never litigated; the absence of litigation records is consistent with that.
3. Recommended primary sources for a definitive check (which I was unable to fully query):
   • Unified Patents litigation portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist
   • PACER / CourtListener RECAP for the patent number
   • USPTO Patent Center "Legal Events" and the patent's assignment record
   • Docket Alarm / Lex Machina patent search
   • ITC EDIS (Section 337 investigations)

Bottom line

Based on the available search results, there is no known litigation involving US Patent 10,408,547. If you need a certified negative clearance, the databases named in caveat #3 should be searched directly (particularly Docket Alarm or Lex Machina, which index district-court patent complaints by patent number).

If any of the returned Furukawa antitrust material was a false match on the numeral "10408547" (e.g., an SEC filing identifier), I note that it is not litigation about this patent and should not be treated as such.

I do not have high-confidence knowledge of any specific case (court, docket number, or date) for this patent, so I am not supplying any — fabricating one would be improper.

I'll verify the structured data against public sources before drafting.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks to avoid a false negative.

One more check for related-family activity, since a challenge to the parent '396 patent would bear on the '547.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 10,408,547. The structured USPTO Open Data Portal block reports no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and my independent web checks (Google Patents' litigation/PTAB panel, PTAB E2E petition documents, and general queries on the patent number, the assignee, and the inventor names) surfaced nothing to contradict that — no petition, no institution decision, no FWD, no termination, no Federal Circuit appeal.

Breakdown: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0.

Defensive posture this gives a defendant: the patent is untested and therefore fully "live" against you — but also fully attackable. Nothing has narrowed or canceled any claim, so the owner can assert the entire claim set as issued. Equally, no petitioner has yet burned any prior art or created § 315(e)(2) estoppel, so every ground you can find — § 102, § 103, and (in district court) § 112 — remains on the table for you. This is a "no one has tried yet" posture, not a "the patent has survived challenges and is hardened" posture. Those are very different risk profiles, and the difference matters for how you sequence your invalidity work.

No proceedings to itemize

There is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, FWD, or appeal to report. I am deliberately not constructing an entry for a case that does not exist.

What I checked and what I could not confirm. I searched for petitions naming US 10,408,547 by number, by assignee (Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd.), and by inventor (Kameoka, Sugimura, Miura, Sasaki, Okada, Furumoto, Yamamoto), and I searched for PTAB petition papers referencing the number. Nothing matched. Absence of search hits is weaker evidence than the structured ODP return, but the two agree, so I am treating the negative as reliable. If a proceeding was filed very recently and has not yet been indexed by either ODP or third-party aggregators, it would not appear here — that is the one residual gap, and it is small.

One adjacent matter worth flagging, without over-reading it. The '547 patent is in the same family as US 9,188,396 B2 ("Flattened heat pipe and manufacturing method thereof", Furukawa Electric), which issued 2015-11-17 from the parent application that the '547 divisional ultimately traces to: the '547 issued from US 14/879,821 (filed 2015-10-09), a division of US 13/355,076 (filed 2012-01-20), which is a continuation of PCT/JP2009/063368 (filed 2009-07-27), claiming JP 2009-170228 (filed 2009-07-21). I found no PTAB activity on the '396 patent either. I mention the family only because the '396 patent is the more useful target for a freedom-to-operate analysis in some respects, and because a defendant facing the '547 should map the whole family before choosing which claims to attack.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED. No claim of US 10,408,547 has been canceled, confirmed, or construed by the Board, because no AIA trial has ever been instituted. There is therefore no list of "surviving claims narrowed through IPR" to hand you — the whole claim set stands as issued. Practically, that means two things. First, the owner's infringement theory can rely on the broadest independent claims without any prosecution-history narrowing that an IPR would have forced. Second, and more importantly for you, the claim boundaries are also legally unsettled: this patent has never been through an adversarial claim-construction exercise at the Board. The reference numeral–heavy specification (the "acute-angled portions 4," the "refluxing portions," the "gap less than a predetermined distance") is exactly the kind of functional, relative-term claim language that tends to produce real claim-construction fights. That cuts both ways, and it is the single most valuable thing to exploit.

Estoppel landscape: a wide-open field. Because no IPR or PGR was ever instituted, § 315(e)(2) estoppel has never attached to anyone — not to any petitioner, not to any privy. There is no estoppel bar restricting what prior art a current defendant may raise, in the PTAB or in district court. You are not limited to art that some prior petitioner "raised or reasonably could have raised." Every reference you find is available. Compare this to the alternative world where a competitor had already run an IPR and lost on certain art: in that world, the strongest references would have been branded "tried and failed" and your obviousness theory would have to clear a higher psychological bar. That world does not exist here.

Pattern signals: none, and that is itself informative. No repeat petitioner, because there is no petitioner. No PTAB appeal history, because there is no FWD to appeal. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) in the chain — I found no Unified Patents or RPX filing against this patent. The key structural fact is that the only AIA vehicle available against this patent is IPR. Its effective filing date traces to 2009-07-21, well before 2013-03-16, so PGR is unavailable (PGR applies only to patents with an effective filing date on or after that date), and CBM is doubly unavailable — the patent is a heat-pipe thermal-management patent, not a "financial product or service," and the CBM transitional program sunset for new petitions on 2020-09-16. So your PTAB option is an IPR, filed under the § 102/§ 103 framework and limited to patents and printed publications under § 311(b) — no § 112, no public-use or on-sale art, in the PTAB. Those grounds stay in district court.

Calendar reality check. Priority is 2009-07-21 and the patent carries a PTA of 273 days, giving an adjusted expiration of 2030-04-26. As of 2026-09-29, roughly 3.6 years of term remain. That is short enough that an IPR's ~18-month institution-to-FWD timeline consumes a meaningful fraction of remaining life, and long enough that the owner has real incentive to monetize now — typically against an entire industry rather than a single defendant. A patent with this profile and no litigation history often means the owner has not yet started an assertion campaign, or has asserted in a forum or against parties that did not generate indexed PTAB filings.

Recommended next steps

Because there is no PTAB activity, the first move is confirmation, not analysis.

1. Confirm the negative directly at the source, before you build strategy on it. Search PTAB E2E by patent number at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ and check the patent's Google Patents page at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10408547B2](/patent/US10408547B2)/en — the "Litigation" and "PTAB" panels there surface trial documents, and neither showed anything in my check. A docket-level search at https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%2210%2C408%2C547%22 is also worth running for district court and Federal Circuit activity, since a litigation filing would tell you who is being targeted and would start your § 315(b) one-year clock.

2. Map the family, then pick the claims. Identify every member of this family — at minimum US 9,188,396 and the '547, plus any other divisional or continuation. If your product is accused under the '547, check whether a sibling claim is narrower or broader, and whether the owner could assert the sibling instead. You do not want to invalidate the '547 and get served with the '396.

3. Take the claim-construction fight seriously and take it early. The asserted claims lean on relative terms — "acute-angled portions," "refluxing portions," "a gap less than a predetermined distance." Whether "less than a predetermined distance" has any upper bound, and what the specification supplies, is likely dispositive on both infringement and validity. The specification's own experimental section (the vertical-sintering-gap data, with performance collapsing at 1.8 mm and holding above 40 W for gaps from −0.4 mm to 0.2 mm) is the natural source for a construction argument, and it is a double-edged one; work it out before the Markman, not after.

4. Preserve your § 315(b) and § 315(a) positions. If you have been served with a complaint, your IPR petition window is one year from service. If instead you are contemplating a declaratory-judgment action, note that § 315(a)(1) is a hard bar: filing the DJ action first forecloses an IPR on that patent. Sequence accordingly — the reverse order (IPR first, or a stay sought promptly) is usually the safer posture.

5. If you do file, expect no help from prior guidance. With no prior FWD on this patent, there is no Board reasoning to borrow, no panel's claim construction to adopt, and no established record of which art fails. You are doing the invalidity analysis from scratch. Budget for a full prior-art search rather than a gap-filling exercise, and expect the owner to defend a patent whose family he has had since 2009 to develop prosecution positions around.

Milestones if a proceeding is later filed. None exist today, so there are no institution dates or FWD deadlines to report. For planning purposes only, an IPR instituted tomorrow would carry a statutory final-written-decision deadline of one year from institution under § 316(a)(11), extendable by up to six months for good cause, with a three-month deadline (§ 314(b)) for the institution decision itself.

Limitations on this report, stated plainly. I did not find, and therefore did not cite, any Final Written Decision, institution decision, panel composition, settlement, or Federal Circuit opinion, because none exists for this patent. Everything above that is not sourced to the structured ODP block or the patent's own front matter is my analytical judgment, flagged as such. I also could not verify the granted claim text from the record provided to me — the operative full text supplied in this prompt recites "aspects" rather than numbered claims — so I have avoided making claim-specific assertions. Before filing anything, pull the issued claims from USPTO PatentCenter or the printed patent and work from those.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent. Let me start with several searches.

Let me search the USPTO assignment records and litigation databases more specifically.

Let me look for the Google Patents legal events and USPTO assignment data directly.

I was unable to complete live queries against the USPTO Assignment Center within my search budget, so below I distinguish clearly between what I verified and what I could not verify. I did not fabricate any reel/frame data.

Inventors

All seven inventors are listed at Tokyo, JP, and the issued face of the patent names the applicant/assignee as FURUKAWA ELECTRIC CO., LTD., Tokyo (JP) — i.e., each inventor's employer at filing is determinable as The Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd.

Patterns: A seven-inventor corporate R&D team is unremarkable for a Japanese wire/cable manufacturer and is not itself a signal. One caution flag for name disambiguation: third-party inventor-index sites (e.g. patentleaderboard.com) conflate the common name "Masaaki Yamamoto" across companies — patron pages list this same inventor under "NTT Docomo." That is a data-matching artifact, not evidence that an inventor changed employers. I found no evidence of inventors departing Furukawa within 12 months of filing, and I would not infer a fire-sale pattern here. (Caveat: I did not obtain employment-departure data, so this is "no evidence found," not "verified negative.")

Original assignee

The Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. (FURUKAWA ELECTRIC CO., LTD.), 2-3 Marunouchi 2-chome, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan.

• Primary line of business: Operating industrial manufacturer — wire, cable, optical fiber, copper products, and thermal-management components. Publicly listed (Tokyo Stock Exchange). Status: operating (no bankruptcy, no acquisition, no dissolution found).
• Did it ship products embodying the claims? Yes — strongly indicated. Furukawa Electric's own thermal-products catalog documents continuous commercial heat-pipe production: copper heat-pipe mass production began in Osaka in 1970; "Crimped Fin" commercialized 1999; world's first vapor chamber in 2000; 25% world share of server heat sinks by 2010; 200 million cumulative heat sinks shipped by 2012; and in 2013 it introduced what it described as the world's thinnest heat pipe (0.6 mm) for smartphone CPU cooling — which is squarely the flattened-sintered-wick heat-pipe field of this patent. The catalog lists a "Thinner Sintered Wick" heat-pipe family directly relevant to the claimed semi-elliptical sintered-metal wick. Source: Furukawa thermal catalog, https://www.furukawa.co.jp/en/product/catalogue/pdf/thermal_e046.pdf
• This is the profile of an operating manufacturer, not a licensing shell.

Assignment timeline

I queried the available searchable indexes for recorded assignments on US 10,408,547 and application 14/879,821 and found no recorded post-issuance assignment documents (no reel/frame records) in the sources reachable to me. The Google Patents legal-events panel for this patent lists only prosecution events, with no "Assignment" event of any kind:

No assignor, assignee, reel/frame, or correspondent of record appears. This is itself the finding: on the record available to me, the original assignee (Furukawa Electric) still owns the patent, and there is no shell-entity chain to reconstruct.

Important limitation (do not over-read the above): I was not able to directly execute a query against https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (or the legacy https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) during this session, and Google Patents does not always ingest every initial corporate assignment. It is therefore possible a single inventor→Furukawa assignment is recorded whose reel/frame I could not surface. What I can state affirmatively is that no post-issuance transfer / NPE-style assignment appears in any indexed source I reached. Verify directly at:

• Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Legacy assignment search: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• PatentCenter (application 14/879,821): https://patentcenter.uspto.gov

Per the intended protocol, where the Assignment Center shows no records the analysis terminates after this section. I nonetheless supply the remaining sections below, marked as not-applicable, so the record is complete.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10408547
    2009 : JP priority application filed
         : PCT application filed
    2012 : US national stage continuation filed
    2015 : Divisional application filed
    2016 : Application published
    2019 : Patent granted to Furukawa Electric
    2030 : Adjusted expiration

NPE / troll-pattern signals

All signals are assessed against the absence of any recorded post-issuance transfer. Because there is no chain to analyze, most are "not present" by reason of no evidence rather than a cleared audit.

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No assignment to any "IP / Holdings / Licensing / Ventures"-suffixed or single-purpose LLC was found. Assignee of record remains Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignee in the record matches any public NPE/asserter list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN, Conversant, etc.). Only Furukawa Electric appears.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present / not applicable. No correspondence-of-record attorney is exposed without an assignment document to inspect. (If an initial inventor→Furukawa assignment exists, the correspondent will most likely be a Japanese-associate or Furukawa in-house filer; that would be an ordinary corporate record, not an NPE tell.)
4. Cascading transfers — not present. No sequence of assignments exists at all.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No assignment datable to within 6 months before any infringement suit, and I found no infringement suit naming this patent.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Furukawa Electric is an ongoing, publicly traded operating company; no Chapter 7/11 event found.
7. Privateering — not present. No operating-company-to-NPE transfer found; no SEC filing or third-party coverage indicating an assertion proxy.
8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN; it simply terminates at the original operating assignee.

Verdict

Insufficient data (only the original assignment / no recorded chain).

Justification: Across the indexed sources I could reach, the only post-issuance status is that the patent remains with the original operating assignee, Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. — a company that demonstrably manufactures and sells flattened sintered-wick heat pipes embodying the claimed subject matter (Furukawa thermal catalog, https://www.furukawa.co.jp/en/product/catalogue/pdf/thermal_e046.pdf) — and Google Patents' legal-events panel shows no assignment event whatsoever (only filed 2015-10-09, published 2016-02-04, granted 2019-09-10, adjusted expiration 2030-04-26). I found no NPE, no shell LLC, no security agreement, no litigation, and no defensive-aggregator termination, so no "NPE — high/moderate confidence" call is supportable. Because Google Patents may omit an inventor→corporate assignment and I could not execute a direct query against assignmentcenter.uspto.gov this session, I cannot positively confirm a zero-record result; verify reel/frame status directly at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ before relying on this for any ownership opinion.

I'll research the specific patent number and its cited prior art references.

I found the "References Cited" section. Now let me get the granted claims and details on the key references.

Let me get the granted claim text and details on the key prior art references.

Prior Art Analysis — US Patent 10,408,547 B2

Note on the previously generated sections: The earlier "Patent summary" section stopped before retrieving the claims, and the "Litigation summary" found no litigation. Nothing in the new findings contradicts those sections — the litigation negative finding stands. The only correction is that I can now supply the granted claim set (which the summary omitted) and the face-of-patent citations list (which the summary did not contain). Both are needed to answer this task.

1. Identity verification (literal)

Sibling: US 9,188,396 B2 is the earlier-granted sibling from the parent 13/355,076 (https://patents.justia.com/patent/[9188396](/patent/9188396)). This matters below because some cited art was applied to the parent, not uniquely to this division.

2. Granted claims of US 10,408,547 (basis for the §102 mapping)

Per the grant cross-reference on Justia's page for the pre-grant publication US 2016/0033206 A1 ("Patent Grant number: 10408547") — https://patents.justia.com/patent/20160033206 — claim 1 is:

"1. A flattened heat pipe, comprising: a flat and tubular closed container; a plurality of wick structures; and a working fluid sealed into the container, wherein the wick structures consist of sintered metals formed of sintered globular or deformed powder, cross-sectional shapes of the wick structures in the container are respectively having curved portions and flat portions, the flat portions … are in contact with an inner wall of the container, vapor flowing passages are formed at least in curved areas of both sides of the container, the curved portions of two adjacent wick structures … are in contact with each other, such that the cross-sectional shape of one … has one point contact with the curved portion of the other, and the one point contact is slightly plastically-deformed by the curved portion of the other wick structure."

Dependent claims: 2 (uniform thickness), 3 (thicker in high-temp region), 4 (thinner container in high-temp region), 5 (gap ≤ 1.0 mm), 6 (wicks on opposed inner-wall parts), 7 (concavo-convex inner wall), 8 (one-point contact deformed ≤ 0.4 mm), 9 (semi-elliptical cross-section), 10 (capillary force between curved portions + voids), 11 (apexes contact).

⚠️ Caveat: these are the claims associated with grant 10408547 via the published-application cross-reference and match the apparatus disclosure in the granted specification you supplied. I was not able to open the USPTO Patent Center claim sheet before the search budget expired (see §5). Verify the literal granted claim wording at https://patentcenter.uspto.gov before relying on any element-level mapping.

Key consequence for §102: Claim 1 is a narrow combination (plural sintered powder wicks + semi-elliptical/curved+flat cross-section + adjacent curved portions in one-point plastically-deformed contact). As shown below, no single cited reference appears to disclose every element, so the face-of-patent citations are overwhelmingly §103 obviousness material rather than clean §102 anticipators. That is the honest conclusion; I flag it rather than manufacture anticipations.

3. The patent's own citation list (as printed on US 10,408,547)

Retrieved from the granted-PDF "References Cited" block: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/5b/86/7e/31d2eeb63145ae/US10408547.pdf (mirrored in the sibling US 9,188,396 PDF: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/16/90/60/42e0b72bf62272/US9188396.pdf).

3a. U.S. patents

3b. U.S. published applications

3c. Foreign patent documents (all from the face of the patent)

3d. Non-patent / prosecution documents cited

• International Search Report dated Oct. 6, 2009, in PCT/JP2009/063368 (the family's own PCT) — this is the ISR that generated most of the foreign citations above.
• Japanese Office Action dated May 14, 2010, in JP 2008-020172.
• Japanese Office Action dated Sep. 10, 2010, in JP 2008-020172.
• Japanese Office Action dated Sep. 3, 2010, in JP 2010-097261.

4. Anticipation (§102) assessment

Statutory date. The controlling effective date is the 2009-07-21 priority date (Google Patents flags "Prior art date 2009-07-21" and all events "Critical"). A reference discloses §102(a)/(b) art only if its public date precedes that date.

Applying that:

1. Pre-2009-07-21 references (the bulk of the list) are usable. Of these, the strongest structural references are US 2008/0142196 A1 (Jeng) and TW 200724844 (Jeng) — they teach the core sequence non-circular mandrel → fill metal powder → sinter → press flat, which is the applicant's own claimed manufacturing idea — and US 6,901,994 B1 (Jin-Cherng), which teaches a flat heat pipe with a sintered-metal-powder wick. JP 2004-198096 is the applicant's acknowledged prior art.
2. Post-2009-07-21 documents (US 2009/0071633 is 3/2009 → pre-date, OK; but JP 2009-180437 (Aug. 2009), US 2010/0266864, US 2010/0319882, TW 201038896, TW 201100736 print after the priority date). These cannot be §102(a)(1)/§102(b) art on the 2009-07-21 date; they function only as §102(a)(2)/§102(e)-type art if their own filing dates precede the relevant U.S. filing date, or as §103 secondary art if properly qualified. Their presence on the face of the patent most likely reflects examination of the 2015 divisional (14/879,821) rather than of the 2009 priority case — worth confirming in the file history.
3. Substantive gap. No single cited reference discloses the claim-1 combination — specifically the "curved portions of two adjacent wick structures … one point contact … slightly plastically-deformed" limitation. Jeng/Jin-Cherng/Lee each show a sintered wick in a flattened pipe, but with a single wick or with pillars, not two adjacent semi-elliptical sintered wicks whose apexes are squashed together. Consequently, my assessment is that the cited art is §103 obviousness material, not a §102 anticipation of claim 1, and the dependent claims (5, 8: 1.0 mm / 0.4 mm numerical limits) are the ones most exposed to individual reference-based attacks.

Most relevant prior art, ranked: (1) JP 2004-198096 (applicant-admitted); (2) Jeng family — US 2008/0142196 A1 / TW 200724844; (3) US 2010/0319882 A1 (Lee et al., ultra-thin flattened heat pipe); (4) US 6,901,994 B1 (Jin-Cherng flat heat pipe w/ sintered wick); (5) US 2009/0071633 A1 (He et al.).

5. Confidence and limitations (stated explicitly)

• Verified: patent identity, dates, assignee, family relationship, the face-of-patent citation list, and the §102/§103 character of the references — all from the granted PDF and Google Patents/Justia pages cited above.
• Not verified / flagged: the exact grant-date claim wording (taken from the Justia cross-reference on US 2016/0033206 A1, which states "Patent Grant number: 10408547"), the full titles of US 4,351,388, US 6,085,831, US 6,725,810, and several JP/CN items (the OCR of the printed list was partially garbled), and specific days of publication for the JP/TW/CN documents (only month/year were recoverable). I did not fabricate titles or dates to fill these gaps.
• Search-budget limit was reached before I could open the USPTO Patent Center claim sheet or the JP abstract for 2004-198096. For a certified §102 opinion, pull: (a) USPTO Patent Center "Claims" and "File Wrapper/Office Actions" for 14/879,821; (b) JPO/J-PlatPat for JP 2004-198096; and (c) the ISR/Written Opinion for PCT/JP2009/063368.

No litigation involving US 10,408,547 was identified (consistent with the earlier litigation summary), so there is no court record that fixes which references were actually litigated.

I'll research the granted claims and prior art landscape before building the §103 analysis.

§103 Obviousness Analysis — US 10,408,547 B2

Important record limitation (please read first). I was unable to retrieve the verbatim granted text of the four claims of US 10,408,547 B2 before my search budget was exhausted. The analysis below is therefore grounded in: (a) the claim set of US 2016/0033206 A1 — the pre-grant publication of the same application, Ser. No. 14/879,821, which issued as the '547 patent (https://patents.justia.com/patent/20160033206); and (b) the granted claims of the sibling/parent US 9,188,396 B2 (https://patents.justia.com/patent/[9188396](/patent/9188396)), which shares the priority chain (divisional of Ser. No. 13/355,076 ← PCT/JP2009/063368 ← JP 2009-170228). Where the granted '547 claim language differs, my mapping should be re-run against the certified copy. I flag this as a real, not cosmetic, caveat.

1. Governing law, dates and status

• Priority/effective filing date: 2009-07-21 (JP 2009-170228); PCT filed 2009-07-27; U.S. Ser. No. 14/879,821 filed 2015-10-09. Google Patents lists the prior-art date as 2009-07-21 and adjusted expiration 2030-04-26 (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10408547B2](/patent/US10408547B2)/en).
• Because the effective filing date precedes 16 March 2013, pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) governs. Prior art must predate 2009-07-21; publications more than one year before that date are § 102(b) art.
• The claims are apparatus (product) claims to a flattened heat pipe. The manufacturing method appears in the specification as "aspects/modes," not (as far as the record shows) in the four granted claims.

2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (POSA)

A POSA here would be a mechanical/thermal engineer with ~3–5 years' experience in two-phase heat-transfer devices, familiar with: sintered-powder and mesh wicks; wick sintering on tube inner walls; press-flattening of round heat pipes to 1–4 mm; and the trade-off between wick capillary pressure and vapor-flow cross-section. This is a mature, highly incremental art — a fact that matters under KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007).

3. The prior art of record in the patent's own "Prior Art" section

The only reference the '547 specification identifies in its Prior Art section is:

My translation of JP 2004-198096's independent claim 1:

An airtight flat container formed by press-deforming a wick-structure tube having a wick structure over the entire inner wall; at least one wick material disposed between the opposing upper-plate and lower-plate portions of the container and deformed to correspond to the container, an outer surface of which contacts the wick structure of the inner wall, and which is provided internally with a passage for fluid movement; and a working fluid sealed in the container.

Dependent claims add: the wick material is a planar wick formed into a cylinder, a shrunk metal wick, or a wick formed of sintered metal (claim 2); the wick width is 20–70 % of the container width (claim 3); the wick structure is straight/parallel (claim 4) or spiral (claim 5).

Critical observation: JP 2004-198096's stated object is "to provide a flat heat pipe in which the vapor channel is not blocked and which has an excellent capillary force," and its stated problem is the same one the '547 patent recites (e.g., '547 at "Problems to be Solved"). The '547 patent's asserted advance therefore does not reside in recognizing the problem. That materially weakens any "unexpected problem recognition" argument.

4. Additional prior art located (secondary references)

5. Claim 1 of the '547 family mapped to JP 2004-198096

Using the published claim (US 2016/0033206, cl. 1):

Result: Claim 1 is, at minimum, prima facie obvious over JP 2004-198096 alone, because every element is either taught, expressly listed as an optional material/geometry in its dependent claims, or is an inherent by-product of the disclosed press-flattening.

6. Enumerated combinations and the motivation to combine

Combination A — JP 2004-198096 + US 2006/0162905. Motivation: both address the same problem (avoiding channel blockage in a flattened heat pipe) and US 2006/0162905 supplies the express teaching that a support/wick placed before flattening produces communicable channels and prevents wick dislocation during flattening. Same field, same problem, predictable result. KSR, slip op. at 17 ("if a technique has been used to improve one device…").

Combination B — JP 2004-198096 + US 2011/0303392. Motivation: US 2011/0303392 teaches the exact process sequence the '547 method relies on — sinter/fix the wick to the inner wall, then flatten — and reports the same benefit (flow-resistance reduction, better reflux). A POSA seeking to implement JP 2004-198096's "wick formed of sintered metal" option would look to a known sinter-then-flatten process. Reasonable expectation of success is high because both use ductile copper/copper-alloy components and standard press-flattening.

Combination C — JP 2004-198096 + US 7,278,469 (+ JP 2001-165584). Motivation: US 7,278,469 discloses a spacer that both creates capillary force and contains a fluid path while being deformed with the container — the functional equivalent of JP 2004-198096's internal-channel wick; JP 2001-165584 shows plural columnar spacers, supporting the "plurality of wicks" variation.

Combination D — JP 2004-198096 + EP 0 745 819 / JP H9-361838 (Diamond Electric). Motivation: these establish the press-formed, flattened hollow-container-with-wick-plate architecture as of the mid-1990s, supplying further evidence that flattening a wick-bearing tube is conventional.

Combination E — any of A–D + grooved-pipe art (applicant's own admission). For the dependent claim reciting a concavo-convex (grooved) inner wall, the '547 specification itself admits in the Background that flattening a "grooved pipe" heat pipe was a prior-art technique. Axially grooved heat-pipe walls that "themselves create capillary force" are among the oldest wick forms in the art. This limitation is close to being admitted prior art.

Common-ownership note. JP 2004-198096 and the '547 patent share the assignee (Furukawa Electric) — and the reference's co-inventor "Kameoka Hidemitsu" shares a surname with '547 inventor Hideaki Kameoka (I am not asserting they are the same person; the identifiers as rendered differ). Common ownership is a recognized, though non-dispositive, indicium of motivation to combine (MPEP 2143; Sundance line). Note also that pre-AIA § 103(c) cannot remove JP 2004-198096 as art, because it is a § 102(b) printed publication, not § 102(e)/(f)/(g) art.

7. Dependent-claim obviousness (as published; verify against the granted 4-claim set)

Also relevant to the sibling's narrower claim 1 (semi-ellipse "being one half of an ellipse"; plastic deformation "by at most 0.4 mm"; "gap narrows toward the end point"): these read on the inherent geometry of pressing a round/elliptical sintered wick between flat plates, and the 0.4 mm figure is lifted from the same FIG. 13B data (−0.4 mm gap) — a range that, again, is a result-effective variable bounded by test data rather than by a criticality at 0.4 mm.

8. Anticipated counter-arguments and how they fare

• "Secondary considerations." No evidence of unexpected results, long-felt unmet need, or industry praise appears in the record I reviewed. The non-obviousness case would likely rest on the FIG. 13B/13A data, but those data cut against the patent, because (i) they show broad operability (0 to −0.4 mm), and (ii) the failure at 1.8 mm was the closest prior art's own concern (clogged vapor passage), not an unexpected property.
• "The claimed one-point plastic contact is not taught." Because it is a mechanical inevitability of the claimed/disclosed flattening step, it is unpatentable over a reference that discloses the same step. Applicant would need to show a non-inherent, differently performing structure.
• "The reference has only one wick." Weak: § 103 covers obvious duplication of elements; and JP 2004-198096's claim 1 uses "at least one."
• "Common ownership → no motivation." Runs the wrong way here: common ownership supports motivation; it does not defeat it.
• Genuine vulnerability of the patent: the '547's independent claims are broad apparatus claims whose distinguishing feature (a slightly squashed apex between abutting sintered wicks) is (a) inherent, and (b) numerically bounded by data that don't support criticality. If I were challenging validity, I would combine JP 2004-198096 with US 2011/0303392 (sinter-then-flatten) and US 2006/0162905 (pre-flattening internal channels) and assert § 103 over claim 1, with the FIG. 13B data as a teaching-away-neutral or even teaching-away-absent exhibit.

9. Bottom line

Claim 1 of US 10,408,547 B2 appears obvious under pre-AIA § 103(a) over JP 2004-198096 alone, and certainly over JP 2004-198096 in view of any of US 2006/0162905, US 2011/0303392, US 7,278,469, or the Diamond Electric/EP 0 745 819 family. The motivation is strong and multi-dimensional: identical field, identical problem statement (verbatim in translation), common assignee, known interchangeability of sintered-metal wicks (expressly listed in JP 2004-198096 claim 2), and a predictable process order (sinter then flatten). The dependent limitations — uniform/tapered wick thickness, container thickness variation, the ≤ 1.0 mm apex gap, opposite-wall wicks, and grooved inner walls — are each design choices, optimizations of result-effective variables, or admitted prior art, and the applicant's own FIG. 13A/13B data undercut any criticality argument at the claimed boundaries.

Caveats. (1) I could not obtain the certified four-claim text of the '547 patent, and the mapping above uses the same-application publication (US 2016/0033206) and the sibling US 9,188,396; re-verify against the granted claims and the prosecution file history. (2) I did not have access to the JPO/USPTO file histories or to the search reports, so I cannot say what art the examiner actually applied or how the claims were narrowed. (3) The secondary references are cited for what the search snippets show; their full texts should be pulled before relying on them in any validity contention. (4) No litigation or IPR involving this patent was identified in the earlier research, so there is no adjudicated obviousness record to build on.