Novelthink -inventions realized- is the private practice of Dr. Barclay J. Tullis.   Novelthink's patent clients included individuals and small companies as well as large multi-national companies.   Novelthink's location is in the United States -> California -> San Francisco Bay Area -> Palo Alto.

Since retirement from patent practice, Novelthink still provides the following professional services:

As an experienced engineer and inventor with a deep technical knowledge in many fields, I have a great advantage for identifying what an inventor should claim within his/her patent application to obtain the best and broadest allowable patent protection.

Experience: (also see Qualifications)

  • Physicist, Retired Licensed Professional Engineer, Retired Registered Patent Practitioner.
  • As of 2022, over 59 years of engineering experience within Silicon Valley in research, product development, and manufacturing.
  • Inventor of over 57 US patents, issued*, as well as many foreign patents.   My most significant inventions include:
    • optical navigation used by optical mice (* plus Pat. No. 5,729,008 by Certificate of Correction),
    • digital cameras employing wireless networking to enhance image quality,
    • various optical and electromagnetic sensors within HP ink-jet and laser-jet printers,
    • the Particle-Per-Wafer-Per-Pass (PWP) contamination control metric used in semiconductor processing,
    • Mini-environments and the Standard-Mechanical-Interface (SMIF) used to improve yield in semiconductor manufacturing, and
    • discreet-event factory modeling, incorporating constraints of skill-matrixed personnel, for understanding and reducing job-lot cycle-times in semiconductor manufacturing.
  • Skilled and experienced at training others problem solving skills and how to discover their own creativity.
  • Skilled and experienced at performing prior-art searches and right-to-use searches.

Read my answer to the question of how to select the best patent agent for you.   And read my short essay, "On the Art of Writing Patent Applications:   Saying More Than Enough without Saying Too Much".

Hopefully my Questions & Answers page will answer your initial questions on how to protect and patent your invention(s).   The United States Patent and Trademark Office publishes an on-line "booklet" titled "General Information Concerning Patents" that answers many other questions.