<It seems our strongest position would come from a ruling that our patent is “unconcerned with the external clock implementation” in terms of it being an asynchronous clock or a synchronous derivation of the variable speed ring oscillator.

If it’s ruled that our patent only applies to implementations that use an asynchronous external clock then there may be room for design work-arounds which avoid infringing on this patent. The synchronous work-arounds I can think of might perform only marginally slower than if an asynchronous external clock were used – this may be preferred over paying for a license. >

Come again????????? Translation?????????? Opty

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Here’s a non-technical example. Suppose a life guard on the beach can only react to calls for help at the exact time that his grandfather clock ticks. Assume his old slow clock only ticks once a minute.

When an external event (someone drowning) calls out to him for help, he'd look at the clock and have to wait for the next tick before he could go and rescue the poor soul. Even after the life guard starts out to save the bloke any additional information he is sent can only be accepted and acted on at the next tick after he hears something said. So those pesky external events that require a long stream of communication exchanges are repeatedly delayed because of the clock. The drowning person and the life guard are not in sync. These wait times add up. It can still be done, but at a slower pace.

This would be similar to the way computers worked before the ring oscillator idea. The main processor clock and the external devices (disk, RAM, keyboard, …) could not communicate between each other at their optimum speeds.

The problem I see is that if the ring oscillator patent is ruled to only apply to asynchronous external signals (life guards and swimmers) then there could be a design that works around the patent by employing the ring oscillator concept while using synchronous clocking of the external device; for example, shove a clock cable running from the grandfather clock up the swimmers butt ;-)

Others might have a better explanation – I welcome their help.