US 10458893

I'll search for authoritative information on this patent number before summarizing.

Let me check for any litigation or CAFC docket activity involving this patent.

US Patent 10,458,893 (US10458893) — Analyst Summary

Note on scope: My search of USPTO records and Federal Circuit 2026 docket reporting returned no litigation, IPR, or appeal activity tied to this specific patent number. Details below come from the authoritative full patent text provided; I flag uncertainties explicitly.

1. Bibliographic Data (confirmed)

Priority chain: This is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 14/953,424 (filed Nov. 30, 2015; the '424 case matured as US 10,121,673 B2), which claimed Taiwan application 104127014 (filed Aug. 19, 2015). The present application also claims priority to Taiwan application 105120516 (filed Jun. 29, 2016). Taiwan counterpart is TW I596328 B.

(Caveat: the "adjusted expiration 2036-12-19" and "Active" status are Google Patents' own characterization and are expressly not legal conclusions.)

2. Abstract (verbatim)

"A miniaturized particulate matter detector that includes a filter and a concentration detector is provided. The filter has a plurality of holes, and the concentration detector is correspondingly disposed under the filter. The concentration detector has a detected area used to detect a concentration of at least one miniaturized particulate matter. A manufacturing method of the filter is also provided."

3. Independent Claim — Plain Language

The granted patent has 14 claims. Within the text supplied, only claim 1 is clearly independent (claims 8 and 11 recite "of claim 1, further comprising / wherein," making them dependent). Claim 14 is truncated in the provided text and I cannot confirm its scope.

Claim 1 — Miniaturized particulate matter detector (apparatus)

A detector made of:

• a filter perforated by multiple holes;
• a concentration detector positioned beneath the filter, having a "detect area";
• a first electrode with several discharge tips aimed at the concentration detector, the tips being designed to electrically charge the particulate matter; and
• a second electrode, arranged so that the concentration detector sits between the first and second electrodes.

The two electrodes generate an electric field across the gap between the filter and the concentration detector, which drives the charged particles from the filter down onto the detect area of the concentration detector.

Plain-language thrust: a PM sensor where an air stream passes through a micromachined perforated filter, the particles are charged by pointed-discharge electrodes, and an applied field pulls the charged particles onto a mass-sensitive detector surface.

Representative dependent claims (for context):

• Claim 2: filter between first electrode and detector; tips charge particles in the region between electrode and filter.
• Claim 3: adds a top cover above the filter (first electrode mounted on it) and a circuit board supporting the detector (second electrode on the board).
• Claim 4: top cover has inside/outside surfaces, a conductive through-hole, and an external pad; first electrode connects through the via to the pad.
• Claims 5–7: adhesive layers define first/second spaces communicating through the filter holes; second electrode's pad extends outside the second space; alternative conductive-adhesive/through-hole routing to put both pads on the top cover's outer surface.
• Claims 8–10: top cover with air inlet plus a collection groove in the filter beneath the inlet to trap oversized particles; groove located to one side of or among the holes.
• Claims 11–13: alternative layout with the first electrode between filter and detector (charging only in that gap); first/second support plates carrying the filter and detector.

4. Technical Overview (from the specification)

• Filter: a through-silicon-via (TSV) wafer filter; hole cross-sections may be cylindrical, gradually reducing, or gradually expanding. Fabrication: photoresist coat/print → etch openings → strip resist → bond a support plate → grind back to expose the openings (TSVs) → dice. Reported example geometry: 45 µm etch depth, top CD 2.79 µm, bottom CD 2.06 µm.
• Detector: an IC chip whose detect area contains a MEMS or quartz oscillator plus a circuit; particle mass loading shifts the oscillation frequency, which is converted to mass/concentration (the specification gives f = (1/2π)√(k/m), with Δf/f = −Δm/2m).
• Packaging: modular stack of top cover, support plate, intermediate element, circuit board, and bottom cover with gaskets/seals and locking keys; fixtures with a pump at the outlet; PM2.5-oriented.
• Stated advantages: size reduction, replaceable filter/detector modules, batch production, use in portable products such as cell phones.

5. Uncertainty and Verification Notes

• No litigation found: Searches for this patent number in connection with Federal Circuit 2026 dockets and ITRI enforcement actions returned nothing directed to the '893 patent. The ITRI cases surfaced by search (ITC Inv. 337-TA-831 re U.S. 6,883,932; ITRI v. Samsung; ITRI v. LG) involve entirely different patents and do not involve US10458893.
• Claim 14 missing: The supplied claim text cuts off mid-claim 13, so its text and any further claim 14 are not verifiable here. I did not fabricate them.
• Drafting inconsistency in the source: In the patent's own text, the "gradually reducing shape" and "gradually expanding shape" definitions appear contradictory as written; and FIG. 1C is introduced inconsistently in the body ("structure in FIG. 1B ... same as ... first embodiment"). These are quoted as-is and not corrected.
• Odd citation in the search set: One result referenced "US10121673B2 ... Miniaturize particulate matter detector and manufacturing method of a filter" as the parent; that is the '424 continuation-in-part parent, consistent with the priority chain above.

If you need confirmation of claim 14, current assignment recordation, or a docket check against PACER/Docket Navigator for this specific number, that would require a direct USPTO PatentCenter / PACER query, which I could not execute here.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10458893 across patent litigation sources.

The initial searches returned unrelated results (notably, US-7612803-B2, where 10458893 is an application number, not the patent in question). Let me search more targeted sources.

Still no litigation hits. Let me try litigation-specific databases directly.

Litigation Search Results for US Patent 10,458,893

Bottom line: I found no litigation involving US Patent 10,458,893.

I searched patent-litigation-oriented sources (including the Unified Patents litigation portal, CourtListener, Google Patents, and general docket-related web search) using the exact identifiers "10458893" and "10,458,893." No district court case, ITC Section 337 investigation, PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR), or CAFC appeal naming this patent as an asserted or challenged patent was returned.

Important disambiguation note (a trap in the results)

A recurring search hit is US 7,612,803 B2 ("Digital Camera with Reduced Image Buffer Memory…"), whose Unified Patents page lists "Application Number: 10458893." That is the USPTO application number (Ser. No. 10/458,893) for the Zoran/Qualcomm camera patent — it is not US Patent 10,458,893. Per the rule against auto-correcting identifiers, these are two different things, and I did not treat that result as litigation involving the patent at issue.

What I could confirm about the patent itself

• Patent: US 10,458,893 B2 — "Miniaturized particulate matter detector and manufacturing method of a filter"
• Assignee: Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan
• Inventors: Chia-Wen Chiang, Cheng-Ta Ko, I-Hsing Lin, Hsiang-Hung Chang, Wen-Chih Chen
• App. No.: 15/245,199; Filed: 2016-08-24; Granted: 2019-10-29
• Priority: 2015-08-19 (TW 104127014); CIP of Ser. No. 14/953,424 (US 10,121,673)
• Adjusted expiration (per Google Patents): 2036-12-19
• It appears on inventor Hsiang-Hung Chang's ITRI patent list (patentleaderboard.com) but with no litigation association.
• The only litigation-adjacent ITRI item in my results was an unrelated older ITC matter involving a different ITRI patent ("the '932 patent," GovInfo FR 2013-05-03) — not US 10,458,893.

Caveats on completeness

• I reached a tool-call limit before I could query PACER directly or run additional docket-specific searches (e.g., Docket Alarm per-patent pages, RPX, or the Unified Patents case list filtered by this number). Those would be the definitive next checks.
• I cannot state with absolute certainty that no litigation exists; I can only report that the sources I searched returned none. US 10,458,893 issued only in October 2019, and it is an ITRI-held portfolio patent that (based on available signals) does not appear to have been asserted.

Suggested verification steps

1. Unified Patents Portal – search the patent number directly: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/10458893 (litigation tab).
2. PACER / CourtListener RECAP – search docket text for "10,458,893" and "10458893."
3. USPTO Patent Center / Patent Trial & Appeal Board – confirm no IPR/PGR petitions against 10,458,893.
4. ITC EDIS – confirm no Section 337 investigation naming the patent.

If you'd like, I can attempt these direct queries next.

I'll verify against live sources before finalizing, since the task asks me to flag any proceedings the ODP may not have indexed.

Initial searches surfaced nothing patent-specific. Let me run a few more targeted checks on the patent owner and the sibling patents.

Let me do a final confirmation pass on possible proceedings and any CAFC appeals.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 10,458,893. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and my web searches (which included patent-number-specific queries against PTAB/PTActs materials and ITRI-as-patent-owner queries) surfaced no petition, institution decision, or Final Written Decision naming 10,458,893. The breakdown is therefore: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied.

Defensive posture: This is not the "hardened patent that survived the PTAB gauntlet" scenario, and it is emphatically not the "claims already canceled" scenario. It is the third case: the patent is completely unchallenged at the Board. Every one of the 14 claims — including independent claim 1 with its charging-electrode-plus-field limitation — sits untested by an Article III or PTAB validity tribunal. For a defendant, that means (a) no free ride from an existing FWD, and (b) no § 315(e) estoppel against you, but also (c) a clean slate to file first if you are going to file at all.

Proceedings

No proceedings to report. The "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied in this prompt — the canonical ODP list — is empty, and I found no proceeding number to populate the required per-proceeding template. I will not invent one, and I will not manufacture a plausible-sounding IPR2024-xxxxx. Anything below is context, not a docket entry.

What I checked and what I found:

Caveat on confidence: The ODP ingest can lag newly filed petitions, and PTAB dockets are not fully mirrored in general web indexes. My searches hit a step limit before I could exhaust secondary sources (Docket Navigator, CourtListener RECAP docket queries, Unified Patents' IPR tracker). I would put high but not absolute confidence on "no proceedings." Before relying on this for a filing or an estoppel analysis, confirm with a direct PTAB E2E / PatentCenter "Proceedings" tab lookup and a PACER/CAFC docket search for the patent number.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 14 claims UNTESTED. Nothing has been canceled, nothing has been confirmed patentable, and no claim has been construed by the Board. That matters here because claim 1 is not a soft target in the abstract — it requires both a pointed first electrode that charges the particles and a second electrode establishing a field across the filter-to-detector gap. A § 103 challenge would need a primary reference teaching electrostatic charging of aerosol particles combined with a micromachined perforated filter and a mass-sensitive (MEMS/quartz oscillator) detection surface. That is a real but non-trivial combination, and no panel has yet had to decide it. Note also the specification's own drafting problems (the internally contradictory "gradually reducing"/"gradually expanding" definitions and the shuffled FIG. 1C introduction) — those are § 112 territory, but § 112 is available in PGR only for this patent, not in IPR (35 U.S.C. § 311(b) limits IPR to § 102/§ 103 on patents and printed publications).

Estoppel landscape. Because there is no FWD, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to anyone — not to you, not to any third party, not to any privy. You retain the full universe of § 102/§ 103 grounds and § 112 grounds (for a PGR). Conversely, no one has blazed a trail for you: there is no prior art record developed through an IPR that you can borrow at claim-construction or invalidity-contention stage. Two timing rules deserve attention: (1) § 315(b) — if ITRI (or an assignee/agent) has served you with a complaint alleging infringement, the one-year IPR clock runs from service, and missing it is fatal; (2) PGR — available only within 9 months of issuance, which for an October 29, 2019 grant has long closed. So your live AIA vehicle is IPR (and any ex parte reexam route the statutory prior-art record supports).

Pattern signals. No repeat-petitioner pattern, because there is no petitioner at all. ITRI does litigate aggressively in other technologies (its Samsung and LG campaigns spanned 15+ suits against foreign companies, and ITRI has been on both sides of ownership disputes that spawned third-party IPRs on other patents), but none of that touches this patent. There is no defensive aggregator — no Unified Patents or similar entity in the chain — which is consistent with a patent that has never been asserted. That last point is the real signal: well-asserted, revenue-relevant patents nearly always attract IPRs. A clean PTAB record for a six-year-old patent from a sophisticated, litigious, government-founded owner suggests the '893 has not been asserted in a US district court or ITC action that anyone cared to challenge. Treat it as a patent that may be asserted later against wearable/portable PM2.5 sensor products, not one that has been tested.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and have been served: Get a docket and service-date confirmation immediately. The § 315(b) one-year bar is the single most consequential date on your calendar. With no FWD and no estoppel, your IPR petition is unconstrained by anyone else's record — but it is also unsupported by anyone else's expert work, so budget for a from-scratch prior-art search of the electrostatic-precipitation / aerosol-charging / MEMS-microbalance literature (this is an area with deep 1990s-era art, and the patent's own cited references include Wong U.S. 5,060,508 and Koutrakis U.S. 5,932,795).

Verify the ODP result directly. Before you decide anything, pull the patent's PatentCenter "Proceedings" tab and run a docket search on the patent number. If you find a proceeding I could not, it changes the entire analysis — a FWD canceling claim 1 would be dispositive, and an instituted-but-pending trial would let you consider a stay motion under § 316(b)/Fintiv factors.

If you are not yet in a dispute: The absence of PTAB activity is information, not comfort. There is no FWD to quote, no canceled claim to point at, and no institution denial whose reasoning you can borrow. The reported ITRI PTAB/litigation activity I surfaced involved unrelated patents and should not be cited as evidence about this one. If you want me to push further, I can run secondary-source checks (Docket Navigator, CourtListener, Unified Patents' tracker) and a Federal Circuit appeal sweep for both this patent number and its parent, US 10,121,673.

Sanity check on what I could not confirm: I could not verify the current assignment/recordation status, and I could not confirm whether any ITRI enforcement campaign ever mapped to this specific patent. Those are open questions that require a USPTO Assignment and PACER query I was unable to execute.

I'll research the assignment record for US 10,458,893 before reconstructing the chain.

Let me look for the specific assignment record and any post-issuance transfers.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 10,458,893 B2

Access note (important): I could not execute a live query against USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) in this environment, and my web searches did not surface the reel/frame or correspondent-of-record for this patent's assignment. The assignment detail below is reconstructed from the Google Patents legal-events record (which mirrors the assignment event) and from the issued patent front page. I have not fabricated a reel/frame number. Where a field could not be verified, it is marked not retrieved.

Inventors

Five named inventors, all listed on the issued patent (US 10,458,893 B2, "(72) Inventors"), with residences clustered in Taiwan:

Pattern notes:

• Employment is inferred from the assignment itself, not from public HR records: the Google Patents legal events show a 2016-08-25 "Assigned to INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH INSTITUTE… ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST" naming all five individuals as assignors by name (CHANG, HSIANG-HUNG; CHEN, WEN-CHIH; CHIANG, CHIA-WEN; KO, CHENG-TA; LIN, I-HSING). An inventor-to-employer assignment of this form is the standard ITRI filing practice.
• The Hsinchu/Hsinchu County residences align with ITRI's Hsinchu campus, consistent with in-house researchers. Hsiang-Hung Chang is independently indexed as an ITRI inventor (patentleaderboard ITRI roster, 11 patents).
• Departure pattern: unclear. I found no evidence that any inventor left ITRI within 12 months of the 2016-08-24 filing, and no evidence of a portfolio fire-sale following departure. There is likewise no evidence of the opposite. Not a finding either way.

Original assignee

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Hsinchu, Taiwan — named on the patent as "(71) Applicant" and "(73) Assignee."

• Primary line of business: ITRI is Taiwan's largest nonprofit applied-research institute, funded largely by Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs, performing contract R&D and technology transfer. It is not a consumer-product company; its monetization model is licensing and spin-offs.
• Product embodying the claims: No evidence surfaced that ITRI itself ships a commercial PM2.5 detector. The specification explicitly pitches "modularized products … applied in portable products, for example, cell phones," i.e., the intended embodiment is a licensed/spun-out module, not an ITRI product line. This is a technology-transfer asset, not a product patent.
• Current status: Operating (nonprofit research institute). No bankruptcy, acquisition, or dissolution indicated. As a Taiwanese nonprofit it does not file SEC 10-K/8-K, so no SEC corroboration is available.
• Related family assets: The continuation-in-part parent, application 14/953,424 → US 10,121,673 B2 ("Miniaturize particulate matter detector and manufacturing method of a filter"), is also assigned to ITRI. So the family did not fracture; both members sit with ITRI.

Assignment timeline

Total recorded assignments retrieved for the '893 patent: 1 (the original inventor→ITRI assignment). I found no post-issuance assignments, security interests, licenses, or releases in the Google Patents legal events.

• Executed on or before 2016-08-25 / recorded 2016-08-25 — Reel/Frame not retrieved
  • Conveyance: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS' INTEREST (see document for details)
  • Assignor: Hsiang-Hung Chang; Wen-Chih Chen; Chia-Wen Chiang; Cheng-Ta Ko; I-Hsing Lin (the five named inventors)
  • Assignee: INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, Hsinchu, TW
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — my search could not surface the attorney/firm of record for this recording. I will not guess it.
  • Context: Initial inventor-to-employer assignment (employment/obligation-to-assign), executed immediately before/around the 2016-08-24 US filing. Not a sale, not a securitization.
  • Recurrence flag: cannot be assessed — a single unidentified correspondent cannot be compared across the chain.

Second relevant event (same family, for completeness — not an assignment): the Google Patents events list "2016-08-24 Application filed by Industrial Technology Research Institute ITRI" and "2016-08-24 Priority to US15/245,199," i.e., ITRI filed as applicant from the outset. Note the priority chain: CIP of 14/953,424 (filed 2015-11-30, now US 10,121,673), which claimed TW 104127014 (2015-08-19); the '893 application additionally claims TW 105120516 (2016-06-29).

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10458893
    2015 : TW priority application filed
         : CIP parent application filed
    2016 : US application 15 245 199 filed
         : Inventors assign to ITRI
    2017 : Published as US20170052103A1
    2019 : Patent granted to ITRI
    2036 : Adjusted expiration per Google

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Independent check performed: no litigation, IPR, or CAFC activity tied to the '893 number was found (consistent with the earlier summary), and no asserter-directory hit (RPX/Unified) for this patent.

Verdict

Insufficient data — the record contains only the original assignment, so there is no post-issuance chain to classify.

In two-to-three sentences: the sole recorded conveyance is the 2016-08-25 inventor→ITRI ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS' INTEREST, and ITRI remains the named assignee/applicant through grant (2019-10-29), so there is no shell-entity, cascading, privateering, bankruptcy, or defensive-aggregator event to score. Every NPE signal is either not present or, for the correspondent field, unclear only because the reel/frame and correspondent could not be retrieved in this environment. This is best characterized as a non-asserting, nonprofit research-institute holding — not an NPE chain — but the formal verdict is "insufficient data" because a single original assignment is all that exists to analyze.

Verification link (to retrieve the reel/frame and correspondent I could not): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search patent number 10458893 (mirror: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html).

Two cross-reference cautions (flagged per instructions)

1. Do not confuse this patent with US 7,612,803. Application number 10/458,893 (filed 2003) belongs to US 7,612,803 (Zoran Corp → CSR Technology → Qualcomm), an unrelated digital-camera patent. Several search hits returned that record because its application number resembles this patent's grant number. It has nothing to do with ITRI or the '893 chain.
2. Drafting quirk carried forward: the specification's definitions of "gradually reducing" and "gradually expanding" read as contradictory as written; that is quoted as-is and does not affect ownership analysis.

I'll search for the USPTO record and the cited prior art for US 10,458,893.

Let me retrieve the full cited-references list from the patent record.

Let me pull the complete citation tables from additional sources.

US 10,458,893 B2 — Cited Prior Art Analysis

Scope and sourcing note. The full patent text supplied in the earlier section did not include the front-page "References Cited" tables. I therefore recovered them from three independent sources and cross-checked:

• Google Patents record — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10458893B2](/patent/US10458893B2)/en (shows "Citations (38)")
• Justia patent record — https://patents.justia.com/patent/[10458893](/patent/10458893)
• The granted-patent PDF — https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/4e/80/76/68cd98f052a658/US10458893.pdf

Important honesty flags before the tables:

1. I could not execute a live USPTO PatentCenter / USPTO Full-Text query — the tool set available returned third-party mirrors of the USPTO front page, not a direct USPTO query. Treat the below as mirror-sourced.
2. The citation lists were truncated in every source I could retrieve. Google Patents says 38 citations; I recovered ~16 US patent documents, ~17 foreign patent documents, and 1 non-patent item. This list is therefore likely incomplete, and I will not invent the remainder.
3. Source discrepancies I am flagging rather than auto-correcting: one reference appears as 8,274,684 in the patent PDF ("8,274,684 B2 7/2012 Kondo et al.") but as 8,225,684, July 24, 2012 in Justia. Likewise a Chinese document appears as CN 101793566 (PDF) vs CN 101793666 (Justia), and CN 201637649 (Justia) vs an OCR-garbled "CN 210637646" (PDF). I cannot resolve these without the original USPTO record.
4. Date note: your task header states April 26, 2026; my operating date is 2026-09-29. Nothing in the analysis turns on this.

1. U.S. Patent Documents cited on the face of US 10,458,893

2. Foreign patent documents cited on the face of US 10,458,893

3. Non-patent literature cited

No other non-patent references were recoverable from the available mirrors. Google Patents' 38-item count suggests the list is longer than what I could retrieve.

4. Bottom-line § 102 assessment

No cited reference anticipates any claim of US 10,458,893. The claims issued over all of them, which is dispositive in practical terms — an examiner-applicant-cited reference that had disclosed every element of a claim would have produced a § 102 rejection, and the patent granted with 14 claims.

Working through claim 1's four elements:

1. Filter with a plurality of holes → disclosed (US 7,254,212, TW 200730814, US 2008/0105034).
2. Concentration detector below the filter with a detect area → disclosed in kind (US 5,932,795, US 6,964,190, US 2008/0105034).
3. First electrode with a plurality of discharge tips aimed at the detector, the tips charging the PM → I found no cited reference disclosing this. This is the point of novelty.
4. Second electrode with the detector between them, generating a field across the filter-to-detector gap to drive charged particles onto the detect area → also not found in the cited art.

So the cited references are best characterized as § 102(a)(1) background art establishing the general field of PM sampling and mass-concentration measurement, and as potential § 103 obviousness fodder in combination (e.g., PM mass monitor + electrostatic precipitator art). They are not § 102 anticipatory art against claims 1–14 as granted.

Effective filing date caveat that matters for § 102: The '893 patent is a continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 14/953,424 (filed 2015-11-30, priority TW 104127014 of 2015-08-19), and the application itself (15/245,199) was filed 2016-08-24 claiming TW 105120516 of 2016-06-29. Because the electrode/discharge-tip claims appear to be the CIP-added subject matter, claim 1's effective filing date is most likely 2016-08-24, not 2015-08-19. This widens the § 102 window and is why a 2016 publication such as US 2016/0063833 A1 (Schultz) remains worth separately checking under § 102(a)(2) — it is a post-2015 but pre-2016-08-24 publication.

5. What I could not verify (and did not fabricate)

• The truncated tail of the citation list — Google Patents reports 38 citations; I recovered ~21 US/foreign entries and one NPL item. The missing entries may include JP/KR documents and additional TW publications.
• Titles for references 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20 and most CN documents — the mirrors returned truncated tables.
• The 8,274,684 vs 8,225,684 and CN 101793566 vs CN 101793666 discrepancies — flagged, not resolved.
• Claim 14's text — as noted in the earlier section, the supplied claim set cuts off mid-claim 13; I could not map prior art to claim 14.
• No litigation, IPR, or CAFC activity tied to this patent number was found previously, and my searches here found none either.

If you need an exhaustive, authoritative list, the next step would be a direct USPTO PatentCenter pull of the '893 file wrapper (front-page references plus the examiner's PTO-892 forms), which I could not execute with the available tools.

I'll start by pulling the actual prior-art citation data for this patent, since the supplied page text includes classification/landscape data but I need the cited references table.

I found the patent's "(56) References Cited" list embedded in the granted PDF. Let me research the key cited references so my §103 combinations rest on what they actually disclose.

Obviousness Analysis — US 10,458,893 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Note on the "Prior Art section": The Google Patents page for US10458893B2 surfaces two prior-art data sets — the "Prior art keywords" classifier tags and, in the granted printed patent (the PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/4e/80/76/68cd98f052a658/US10458893.pdf), the (56) References Cited table. The HTML page text supplied did not reproduce the citation table, so I retrieved it from the granted PDF. I list it below and mark what I was able to verify versus what I am characterizing from bibliographic data only.

A. The references actually cited on the face of the patent

"Prior art keywords" (Google Patents): miniaturized · filter · electrode · particulate matter · detector. (Note that "electrode" is one of the classifier's top terms — the examiner/specification framework already treats electrodes as core art.)

U.S. patent documents (56):

Foreign citations: CN 1075549; CN 1120668; CN 1314996; CN 200941093; CN 100464060; CN 101793566; CN 210637646; CN 101983098; CN 102224406 (list truncated in the PDF extract).
Non-patent: "Office Action of U.S. Appl. No. 14/953,424," dated Dec. 14, 2017.

Three references were verified against their own specification text; the rest I did not open, and I will not attribute disclosure to them beyond their titles. I flag this as the single biggest limitation on the analysis below.

B. Claim 1, element by element

Only claim 1 is independent (claims 2, 8, and 11 all recite "of claim 1"). Claim 1 requires:

Limitations 1 and 2 are squarely in the admitted prior art (see §E). The claim's only arguable point of novelty is the integration of a tip-discharge charger and a biasing electrode so that the field sweeps charged particles from a micro-filter onto a mass-sensitive detect area.

C. §103 Grounds

Ground 1 — Gundel '292 + Chu '115 (+ Wang '116 for the inlet)

What each teaches:

• Gundel '292 (UC Regents) is a mass-based PM analyzer built on an acoustic-wave resonator with thermophoretic particle transport to the resonator. It discloses the core of claim 1's limitations 1–2: airborne particles are collected onto a mass-sensitive resonator and the accumulated mass is read out. This is the same physical principle the '893 patent invokes (frequency shift → mass → concentration).
• Chu '115 / US 9,541,475 discloses a microchannel particle size selector (curved channel with shroud flows) with a detector downstream, explicitly aimed at "a sensor that is smaller and lower in cost than existing devices and at least capable of measuring the levels of PM2.5." Its background section expressly surveys: gravimetric filter samplers; TEOM; optical counters; and — critically — "Electrostatic separators and detectors cause particles to become electrically charged, and then select for particle size by manipulating the balance of electrostatic forces and physical inertia." That sentence puts charge-the-particles-then-move-them-with-an-electric-field directly in the art.
• Wang '116 teaches real-time size-segregated mass concentration using an inlet conditioner / size-selective inlet feeding a mass-based measurement — i.e., a filter/holes element ahead of a detector.

Motivation to combine (KSR / MPEP 2143):

1. Same field, same problem. All three address miniature, real-time PM2.5 monitoring; KSR permits combination of references "designed to address the same problem." Gundel and Chu even share the same assignee-side ecology (UC/aerosol instrumentation; Chu's co-inventors are MEMS/CMOS researchers).
2. Predictable improvement in collection efficiency. Both Gundel's thermophoretic transport and a plain filter rely on weak, diffusion/impaction-limited deposition; the '893 patent itself states its goal is to "reduce the blocking situations" and improve particle delivery to the detect area. A POSITA would recognize that corona charging + an applied field (the ESP principle Chu's background describes) is the standard way to raise deposition efficiency and cut response time on a mass sensor. That is a "known technique used to improve a similar device in the same way." MPEP 2143(A)(1)/(C).
3. No change in principle of operation. Adding a charger and bias electrode to Gundel's resonator does not alter its mass-measurement principle; it merely improves the transport of particles to the same detection surface.

Result: Gundel '292 supplies limitations 1–2, Chu '115 supplies the size-selective micro-filter concept and the express teaching of charging particles and manipulating them electrostatically, and the discharge-tip/opposed-electrode arrangement (limitation 3–4) is the conventional corona-charger + collection-plate structure of electrostatic precipitation. Claim 1 would have been obvious.

Ground 2 — Wang '116 + Gundel '292 + tip-discharge charger

Wang '116 teaches a size-selective inlet (a filter/hole structure) with real-time mass-concentration readout; Gundel '292 supplies the acoustic-wave resonator as the mass detector; the corona charger with discharge tips and a collection bias is elementary ESP art. The motivation is the same efficiency/response-time rationale. This ground is weaker than Ground 1 only because the electrostatic-transport teaching is drawn from general ESP knowledge rather than from a single verified reference in the (56) list.

Ground 3 — AAPA (Applicant's Admitted Prior Art) + Gundel '292 + ESP

The specification admits (Background, and the "Definitions" panel):

• "Cyclone-type miniaturized particulate matter filter is used to fix the air speed and select an exact size of miniaturized particulate matter";
• "Impactor-type miniaturized particulate matter filter collects the miniaturized particulate matters from the air that passes through … holes as well as a blocking plate under the holes"; and
• "Other schemes … include C14 measurement, optical measurement, Tape Element Oscillator Measurement (TEOM) … Their principles are selecting exact miniaturized particulate matters and proceeding a mass measurement."

These admissions are prior art under §103. Together they supply: (i) size-selective micro-filters with holes, and (ii) resonant/oscillating mass measurement (TEOM) of the size-selected particles. Add the universal electrostatic-precipitation teaching of point-discharge charging + collection field, and every limitation of claim 1 is met.

The strongest form of the rejection is therefore the admitted TEOM/filter art in the patent's own Background, combined with routine ESP charging/collection and Gundel '292 or Chu '115 for the mass-resonator/micro-filter details.

D. Dependent claims

Under KSR, these are "additional element[s] … with no change in the operation of the device," and are supported by "a proffer of evidence of similar arts."

E. What actually is in the admitted prior art (per the patent's own words)

The specification's Background is the most damaging §103 material because it forecloses novelty arguments on the filter/oscillator core:

• "weighing measurement machine is continuously collecting the particulate matters in the air for 24 hours … measuring the weight … converting the measured weight value into the concentration value" → gravimetric mass measurement.
• Cyclone-type, impactor-type, and cyclone-design micro-filters → perforated size-selective filters with holes.
• "TEOM" → oscillating-element mass measurement, i.e., the claimed "concentration detector."
• The specification also concedes the goal: "uses the developer and the etching scheme to make the TSV filter … reduce the selecting number of the opening size and the inlet sizes." That is a manufacturing/optimization argument, not a patentable technical advance.

F. Practical caveats and counter-considerations

1. Effective filing date of claim 1. The E1/E2 electrodes and discharge tips appear only in the CIP-added figures (FIGS. 9A–12D). The parent (Ser. No. 14/953,424, filed Nov. 30, 2015 → US 10,121,673) and the TW 104127014 priority (Aug. 19, 2015) may not support these limitations. If claim 1's charging/field limitations are only supported by the Aug. 24, 2016 CIP filing, the prior-art window opens to all art published between the 2015 priority date and Aug. 2016 — materially enlarging the §103 attack surface. This should be checked against the '424 parent's disclosure before finalizing any ground.
2. Unverified references. I verified disclosures for only US 7,168,292, US 8,534,116 (Wang), and US 2013/0213115/9,541,475 (Chu). The remaining (56) references (Solomon '465, Lai '187, Koutrakis '795, Nieuwenhuis '066, the CN documents, etc.) may supply better explicit teachings of corona charging, ESP collection, or TSV-hole filters. They should be opened individually before a rejection is finalized.
3. Possible anticipation, not just obviousness. If any unopened reference expressly shows tip-discharge charging directly onto a mass-sensitive detection surface, claim 1 faces §102 rather than §103. Gundel '292 is the closest candidate but uses thermophoretic, not electrostatic, deposition.
4. Secondary considerations. The patent presents no evidence of unexpected results, licensing, copied art, or industry praise. The commercial-utility statements ("portable products, for example, cell phones") are aspirational and, standing alone, are the kind of "inherent advantage" argument that carries little weight.
5. Claim 14 is missing from the supplied text. I reached the source-text truncation at claim 13 and did not fabricate claim 14; its scope must be obtained from the USPTO before any final validity opinion.

Bottom line

Claim 1 recites a known mass-sensitive PM detector (TEOM / Gundel '292) placed downstream of a known size-selective micro-filter (admitted impactor/cyclone art; Chu '115; Wang '116), with the particles charged by conventional tip-discharge electrodes and swept onto the detector by an applied field (elementary electrostatic-precipitation art, expressly acknowledged in Chu's background). Each element is separately known, the combination yields only a predictable improvement in collection efficiency and response time, and there is a clear articulated motivation to combine — so claim 1 (and, by dependency, claims 2–13) would likely have been obvious under § 103(a). The strongest rejection is the Applicant's-Own-Admitted-Prior-Art route, with Gundel '292 as the primary mass-detector reference and Chu '115 as the charge/size-select micro-filter reference.

Key sources: Google Patents US10458893B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US10458893/en); granted PDF references-cited table (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/4e/80/76/68cd98f052a658/US10458893.pdf); Gundel US 7,168,292 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US7168292); Wang US 8,534,116 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8534116); Chu US 2013/0213115 / US 9,541,475 (http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/03/51/32/57fa3bd8d9e26b/US9541475.pdf).