Corning Launches Suite of New Glass Innovations for Next-Gen Consumer Electronics

July 2018

Try to guess how far you'd get if you took 30 steps right now.

It's not that hard. Maybe 40 feet, 50 feet? Now try to guess how far you'd get if those were exponential steps, growing at a significantly faster rate each time. 

"You would circle the globe 26 times," Corning's John Bayne told more than 60 journalists from media outlets around the world, gathered at Corning's Silicon Valley facility for the unveiling of Corning® Gorilla® Glass 6 and Corning® Gorilla® Glass DX and DX+.

The vice president and general manager of Gorilla Glass was borrowing an illustration about the pace of exponential innovation. In today's Digital Era, Bayne said, we're living through a period of intensely rapid growth, and it's hard to predict where each development will lead next.

But for Corning, there is a clear call to action:

"The answer has to be innovate more. You absolutely have to innovate. That's what we've seen smartphones do, and that's what Corning does to support the industry," Bayne said.

"That's what we've done with Gorilla Glass 6."

Built on a decade-long legacy of delivering the toughest cover glass available for consumer mobile devices, Gorilla Glass 6 is Corning's most durable cover glass yet. Gorilla Glass 6 improves upon Gorilla^® Glass 5 by surviving drops from higher heights, but, more importantly, has been engineered to survive multiple drops.

Josh Jacobs is a Corning scientist charged with understanding why glass fails and how to strengthen it. Speaking at the launch, the technology manager, Product Performance & Reliability, Gorilla Glass, explained how Corning has helped the mobile consumer electronics industry develop over the last ten years, and how the evolution in device design led to the need for Gorilla Glass 6.

Jacobs described a symbiotic relationship between glass design and device design. As Corning continues creating more durable glass, designers are inspired to take things to the next level. And as designers keep pushing both complexity and esthetics, Corning's glass must constantly improve along with their enhancements.

"Corning has been very proud to have been an innovating partner. Six billion devices feature Gorilla Glass," Jacobs said.

"Glass has really been chosen as the material of choice for mobile consumer electronics applications."   

Throughout this evolution, the performance of glass has become an increasingly vital piece of the equation. And that is the backdrop, Jacobs said, against which Corning began work on Gorilla Glass 6.

"Damage resistance, drop performance, the retained strength of glass are more critical than ever," he said.

To improve cover glass performance, Corning scientists developed and engineered an entirely new material to address the challenge of multiple drops. On average, in lab tests, Gorilla Glass 6 survived 15 drops from 1 meter onto rough surfaces, and is up to two times better than Gorilla Glass 5. Under the same test conditions, competitive glass compositions, such as soda lime and aluminosilicate, did not survive the first drop.

In addition to next-gen cover glass, Corning is also innovating in new device categories. Gorilla Glass continues to be the most widely used cover material on smart watches – and the introduction of Gorilla Glass DX and DX+, which complement the legendary toughness of Gorilla Glass to deliver superior antireflective optics and scratch resistance for wearables, further demonstrates Corning’s market leadership.

At the Silicon Valley event, attendees got to speak to both Bayne and Jacobs during a Q&A after their keynotes. And then attendees went through a series of demonstrations and tests to see for themselves just how durable Corning's latest glass innovations are.

CNBC gave John Bayne the final word in coverage of Gorilla Glass 6:

"Glass is more important than ever. It's not only on the front of the device, it's now on the back of the device, it can be used as a design element on the back and it enables wireless charging and higher data rates like 5G. Glass is 100 percent the future of the smartphone industry."