Swanson's law Swanson's law Swanson's law is the observation that the price of solar photovoltaic modules tends to drop 20 percent for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume. At present rates, costs halve about every 10 years. It is named after Richard Swanson, the founder of SunPower Corporation, a solar panel manufacturer. Swanson's law has been compared to Moore's law, which predicts the growing computing power of processors. Crystalline silicon photovoltaic cell prices have fallen from $76.67 per watt in 1977 to $0.36 per watt in 2014. Plotting the module price (in $/Wp) versus time shows a dropping by 10% per year.
Fonar Corp. v. General Electric Co. Fonar Corp. v. General Electric Co. Fonar Corp. v. General Electric Co., 107 F.3d 1543 (Fed. Cir. 1997), was a case decided in 1997 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit concerning source code and the disclosure requirement for software patents. "Fonar" was a dispute between medical device manufacturer Fonar Corporation and General Electric over Fonar's patent on MRI technology. Fonar's founder, Raymond Damadian, was issued U.S. Patent 3,789,832 (priority date 1972-03-17) for an "apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue" using the magnetic resonance of atoms. Damadian's patent was the first patent on an