Engineering On The Edge

We know that mobile devices are getting thinner, so how about thinner glass for displays? Gorilla Glass maker Corning has debuted an ultra-thin product called Willow Glass that is flexible enough to be wrapped around a device to create curved displays, and thin enough to further reduce device thickness and weight in mobile computing/phone designs.

Corning unveiled the new product at the Society for Information Display’s Display Week trade show in Boston this week. The glass can be manufactured as thin as 0.05mm thick.

According to the company, the glass could enabled “wrapped” displays, as well as support thinner backplanes and color filters for organic LEDs (OLED) and LCD displays in mobile devices. It could also be used to develop “conformable (curved) displays for immersive viewing or mounting on non-flat surfaces.”

“Displays become more pervasive each day and manufacturers strive to make both portable devices and larger displays thinner. Corning Willow Glass provides the substrate performance to maintain device quality in a thin and light form factor. Currently manufacturing in a sheet-to-sheet process, we expect Corning Willow Glass to eventually allow customers to switch to high-throughput, efficient roll-to-roll processing, a long-awaited industry milestone.” – Dipak Chowdhury, division vice president and Will Glass program director.

According to the company, other potential applications would include light fixtures and flexible solar cells. Eventually, Corning believes that Willow could replace Gorilla Glass in a number of mobile device applications. At the CES show in Vegas this year, Corning also unveiled a 20% thinner Gorilla Glass 2.

You can view a video about the glass below:

Source: Corning