willow glass
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Corning Gorilla Glass now used in over 1 billion devices worldwide
Gorilla Glass is the ultra-hard, scratch-resistant material that debuted on the original iPhone. When that seminal smartphone was in development, Apple CEO Steve Jobs talked Corning CEO Wendell Weeks into starting mass production of Gorilla Glass. It was a good thing that Weeks listened, as Corning's quarterly earnings release notes that Gorilla Glass is now used in over 1 billion devices worldwide. Just about every major manufacturer uses the glass now, including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, HTC, LG, Lenovo, Nokia and Sony. It's responsible for over US$363 million in revenues for Corning in the third quarter of 2012 alone. What's coming next from Corning? A new "ultra-slim flexible glass" called Willow Glass is expected to change the future of smartphones and tablets, making curved glass surfaces simpler and cheaper to produce. [via TechCrunch]
Corning unveils slim, flexible Willow Glass (video)
That is not plastic in the image above, it's glass. In particular it's a sheet of Corning's new 100-micron-thick Willow Glass, a new ultra-thin and flexible substrate for LCDs and OLEDs. The extreme thinness of the glass should lead to lighter, svelter devices, but it also means that shape is no longer a barrier for design. In fact, Corning expects Willow Glass will eventually lead substrates to be manufactured "roll-to-roll" instead of "sheet-to-sheet" -- similar to how newspapers are printed. Even though the glass is as thin as paper (literally) it doesn't give up its patented Corning toughness. Though, we wouldn't subject this to the same sort of abuse that the more brolic Gorilla Glass is built to withstand. Willow will start showing up in smartphones first, but the company is already looking into additional applications, such as solar cells and lighting. For more, check out the video and PR after the break.
