I'm not talking about proving it in court, I'm asking you to consider it in your own mind. When the problem with boron doping was realized, how long do you think it would have taken everyone to go down that column of the periodic table and use gallium instead? It's not like there was a huge selection of elements to chose from.
Just looking at the field of software process, there are things I've been doing for 20 years that sure seem obvious to me and that I thought would be obvious to everybody else in short order. But here we are and the dominant process approach has gone from "chaotic waterfall" to "chaotic waterfall with Scrum jargon and modestly shorter delivery cycles".
Well, since you obviously can't be bothered to do the research I will tell you. It didn't take them long at all. There were studies looking at the impact of boron-doping and gallium-doping back in the 70s. So why was a patent issued in 2000 that everyone has been waiting to expire? Why hadn't we moved from boron-doped PV substrate to gallium-doped substrate in the two decades between those points? Maybe that is the question you should have been asking.
Turns out that it is incredibly fucking hard to manufacture silicon ingots with the correct doping but without too much oxygen in them that make the gallium-doped wafers perform worse than boron-doped ones. Everyone knew gallium was a better target, no one had a fucking clue how to make them at scale or at an acceptable cost. Figuring this out is ENTIRELY what this patent is about.
Possibly, but I’d like to pose a relevant question: had they discovered it and then chosen to keep quiet, how long would it have been before someone else discovered it independently?
Answer: definitely less than 20 years. So why then should the first group to discover this be given 20 years of exclusivity?
People claim that this promise of exclusivity drives the research. On the other hand, why pour money into research if there’s a strong chance that my competitor will beat me to the punch and then forbid me from making use of the equivalent outcome that my own research yields (and of the in-house talent I developed along the way)?
> Possibly, but I’d like to pose a relevant question: had they discovered it and then chosen to keep quiet, how long would it have been before someone else discovered it independently?
>Answer: definitely less than 20 years. So why then should the first group to discover this be given 20 years of exclusivity?
What is absolutely hilarious about your musings here is that you are completely, 100% wrong. You make un-informed guesses and manage to get just about every aspect of the issue completely wrong. Well done.
Would you like to know when it was known that gallium-doped silicon substrate was going to perform well and possibly better than boron-doped substrate? At least the mid-70s. Would you like to know when this patent was issued? 2000. So for almost 25 years everyone KNEW gallium was better. It was literally sitting out there on every periodic table on the planet and for some reason no one produced gallium-doped PV cells at scale or cost. Why is that?
Maybe because the trick was not knowing that gallium is what you wanted to dope the silicon with, but in knowing HOW TO ACTUALLY PULL IT OFF. For more than two decades it was staring everyone in the face. For more than two decades everyone knew what the target was. For more than two decades NO ONE DID IT. That is why the first group to figure out how to manufacture gallium-doped silicon with the proper amount of other components were given exclusivity, because if they had not managed to do it then maybe we would all still be waiting for gallium-doped PV cells.
