[author: Nan Li]

[Foreword]

Article 26.3 of the Chinese Patent Law prescribes that the description should be sufficiently clear. However, most patent attorneys would find it difficult to satisfy the requirement of “sufficiently clear”: it takes a lot of work to get the description to the point where it is clear to the patent attorney, the inventor, as well as the examiner.

Typical reasons leading to unclear drafting of the description include: inadequate understanding of the patent attorney with regard to the technical solution, difficulty of the technical solution per se to be thoroughly expressed in words, and incompetence of the patent attorney in literal expression.

To overcome the above problems, the patent attorney needs to improve himself/herself in various aspects, such as enriching personal knowledge reserve on the technology, improving language skills, enhancing communication with the inventor, and so on, which all require meticulous efforts and cannot be achieved in one go.

With that said, there are time-saving and energy-saving methods helping us to draft the description clearly. Modularity, for example, is a very good start.

[Introduction to the concept of modularity]

The concept of modularity emerged in the 1950s. Featured by dividing a product into a series of independent modules, designing and manufacturing each module separately, and selecting and assembly the modules to obtain the final product, modularity has the prominent advantages of improved efficiency, increased fault tolerance, and diversified final products. As a result, the design concept of modularity spread through the front-tier industrial entities rapidly.

According to the design concept of modularity, a module refers to a functional or structural unit that is independent from the other units at a certain level and thus can be designed, manufactured, replaced or upgraded independently. An individual module need only satisfy the design requirements for itself to guarantee the cooperation and substitution of the modules. This design concept dramatically improves the working efficiency. In addition, interchangeable modules enable functional diversities in a flexible manner.

For example, in automotive design, a vehicle may be divided into a plurality of modules, including the vehicle body, the chassis, the engine, the console, the interior, etc., the respective design requirements of function, shape and dimension, material, connection manner, and the like for each module being planned in advance. As such, the design of a vehicle is broken down into elements to be handled in parallel by several design teams.

[Composing the description following the concept of modularity]

The concept of modularity is suitable to be applied to the drafting of the description.

A patent attorney may find it challenging to understand the technical solution of the inventor accurately and thoroughly within a limited period of time. In view of this, the patent attorney may seek the aid of modularity.

The modularized drafting can be implemented in the following two steps:

First, grasping the overall characteristics of the technical solution, sorting out the technology architecture and the inventive points

This step forms the foundation for the subsequent dividing of modules. Therefore, we must have an accurate understanding of the technical solution from the perspectives of the technical field, the main technical problem to be solved, the main technical means, and the technical principle. Even if there are confusions and difficulties which cannot be clarified immediately, at least the scope of these confusions and difficulties should be clarified.

Second, dividing the technical solution into relatively independent modules

This step intends to clearly explain the technical solution. So the modules should be flexibly divided based on the characteristics of the technical solution per se.

If the description is well composed, the modules divided will be more independent and associated orderly. The description describes a respective module in one section, and thus can easily express the technical solution clearly. In describing the relationship between the modules, the details need not be repeatedly elaborated, which makes it possible to concisely explain the whole of the technical solution.

In a patent description drafted as such, either the overall technical concept or the detailed technical solution is clear at one glance. Even if the details still need improvement, the part needing perfection can be easily separated from the rest, saving subsequent working load for amending the description.

[Examples]

Two common thoughts for composing modularized descriptions are explained below, accompanied with examples.

Example 1 Smart Phone with Improved Camera Lens

The improvement made in the technical solution of Example 1 is the camera lens, belonging to hardware. The description of Example 1 is relatively easy to compose.

Based on the structure and the function of the hardware, the smart phone of Example 1 can be divided into the following modules: the case, the main circuit board, the battery, the communication module, the lens module, the control module, and the display module, etc. The description may first generally introduce the structure and the function of the smart phone to help the reader have an initial concept of the smart phone involved in the technical solution. Then, the description may briefly explain how the technical problem intended to be solved by the technical solution is resolved by improving the structure of the camera lens. Specific details may be explained in the subsequent description of each module.

Since the inventive point is in the module of the lens module, the patent description attaches emphasis to the section of the lens module, whilst the description of the rest six modules serves as auxiliary contents as long as the lens module is sufficiently explained, which does not require much effort and time.

After the details of each module are explained, the technical correlation between the modules is described, including how the modules coordinate with each other in the operation using the camera lens to achieve the purpose or the technical effect of the invention.

For a variation or an improved solution, the modified or improved module(s) may be emphasized, explaining the modified or improved technical features and the corresponding technical effects.

Example 2 Smart Phone with Improved Biometric Authentication

The inventive point of Example 2 involves a relatively wide range of technology. There are some difficulties to be overcome in order to compose the description of Example 2.

At present, biometric authentication methods commonly used on a smartphone include fingerprint recognition, face recognition, voice recognition, etc., each being based on a working principle involving both hardware and software. Therefore, the key points of the technical improvement of Example 2 must be accurately grasped before drafting the description. The description should be properly composed based on determining whether the improvement made by Example 2 relates to hardware or software, or both.

If the improvement only involves hardware or is hardware-based, the drafting manner of Example 1 may be employed substantially, with focus being attached to the module where the improved hardware is located.

If the improvement point involves pure software or is software-based, phone may be modularized taking the functions of the modules into consideration. For example, the phone may be divided into a biometric acquisition unit, a control unit, a display unit, a storage unit, etc., with the unit involving the improvement being emphasized. For example, since the improvement of the phone lies in the optimization of the speed and the accuracy of data acquisition by the control unit from the biometric acquisition unit, the module to be emphasized in the description should include at least the biometric acquisition unit and the control unit.

If the improvement is a combination of hardware and software, the description may be drafted from perspectives of the hardware and the software, respectively, specifying the improvement based on the combination of hardware and software. For example, the description may be drafted as below: generally following the drafting manner of Example 1, and explaining the hardware structure of the phone, with emphasis placed on the hardware modules involving the improvement; then modularizing the phone in view of the functions while explaining which hardware modules are involved in each functional module; finally, specifying how the functional modules involving the improvement operate through the associated hardware modules.

[Summary]

The most stand-out characteristic of modularity is dividing a whole solution into parts in an orderly manner, thereby reducing the difficulty for explaining the modules and facilitating locating the problems in drafting the description, which in turn reduces the load of work of patent attorneys. Sometimes, it is also necessary to review the whole solution by sorting out how multiple modules work together to reflect the innovation and achieve the technical effects. This can be carried out smoothly after sufficiently depicting and understanding each module.

In drafting, reading or revising the description, the concept of modularity has obvious advantages and is more conducive to making the patent description meet the “clear” requirement under of Article 26.3 of the Chinese Patent Law. However, in modularizing the description, the patent attorney should understand the technical solution accurately and grasp the technical principles in the first place. In particular, the patent attorney should sort out the main technical means adopted to solve the technical problems. Only in this way, the description can be modularized in a proper manner.