Case Explained: SLINGSHOT PRINTING LLC v. CANON U.S.A., INC

Court: United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

Filed: 2026-07-16

The Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s final written decision finding claims 1–6 and 8–20 of U.S. Patent No. 7,290,864 unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as obvious. The court applied a de novo standard of review to the Board’s claim construction and a substantial evidence standard to its underlying factual findings. Regarding claim construction, the court agreed with the Board that the limitation “physically separated proximal to the bondpad” refers to the point where power traces separate relative to the “end of the trace,” rather than relative to the heater arrays, noting that neither the claims nor the specification required a comparison to other structures. On the issue of obviousness for dependent claims 3 and 9, the court held that substantial evidence supported the Board’s finding that a person of ordinary skill in the art would understand the bondpad location based on a combination of prior art references (Benjamin144, Benjamin703, and Childers) and expert testimony, even if one figure was not to scale. The court rejected Slingshot’s arguments that the Board lacked evidence or misinterpreted the figures, as patent drawings may be examined for general relative distances without requiring precise proportions. As a result of this affirmation, the challenged patent claims remain invalid, and Canon U.S.A., Inc. prevails in the inter partes review proceeding.

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