I'm not sure how that circuitry can be interpreted to be a oscillator. A ring oscillator, which is what the examiner claims the circuit in fig 6 to be, requires feedback and I don't see it. An odd number of inverters are required and the last stage has to be fed back to the first stage. From what I can gather it is a simple control signal generating logic.

I have to refresh my memory about the definition of active area wrt the 148 patent. I will have to read the entire patent again.

Any other ring oscillator would mean an oscillator on a different substrate and therefore the oscillator logic cells (invertors) would be subject to diffferent cell delays than that of the logic cells on the die that the microprocessor is on. This is specified clearly on the 336 patent but not on the 148 as far as i can see.