Five Ways Corning Enables the Latest Mobile Technology Trends | Glass and Communication Technologies | Corning

Whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or laptop computer, chances are you carry one, or all, of these devices with you every day. And while your device may not be made by Corning, we make the cover glass that helps protect your screen, the substrate glass that enables your phone to display images and detect physical touch, as well as the optical and wireless networks you use to make calls and browse the Internet.  

Every day, Corning® Gorilla® Glass, and our display glass and communication networks products make your digital experience possible. But we won’t settle for what’s possible; we’re always looking to solve the industry’s toughest problems and enable the latest consumer electronics trends to make devices tougher, thinner, and brighter while making wireless coverage faster and more reliable.

With more portable electronic devices these days, a tough cover glass is more than just a luxury, it’s a necessity. From bumps and scrapes to scratches and drops, we launched several iterations of our industry-leading cover glass to meet the demands of an on-the-go society.

Most recently, we developed our toughest cover glass to date – Gorilla Glass 4 – to help solve one of your biggest hardships – breakage from drops. And while Corning’s latest cover glass solution offers a step change in durability, our scientists are hard at work trying to make even tougher and more damage-resistant cover glass.

Electronics have come a long way since the bulky, heavy models of just ten years ago. Today’s smartphones, tablets, and laptops are thinner and sleeker than ever before thanks in part to our continued innovation. Now, our cover glass solution can be as thin as 0.4 mm, the thickness of just four sheets of ordinary copy paper.

While cover glass may be getting thinner and lighter, some of the most significant reductions in thickness happen inside your device. Some of our substrate glasses, the layers of glass that make your device function and display images, can now be just 100 microns thin, the thickness of a human hair. With these advances in glass technology, we’re seeing smartphones thinner than 5 mm and even TVs less than 10 mm thick.

We’ve all seen the hyper-realistic qualities of some of today’s displays. In order to support greater pixel density, our scientists created glass that is thermally and dimensionally stable to enable high-performance display capabilities. This results in brighter, more energy-efficient displays with higher resolutions, up to 100 pixels per inch. 

Through the use of glass as a light-guide plate (LGP) in LCD TVs you now get brighter images. Light guides distribute light through TVs in order to create pictures, and our glass compositions are able to deliver outstanding transmission to minimize color shift and deliver vibrant displays with immersive colors. And because of the stiffness of glass, panel makers can remove bulky structural components required when using a plastic LGP, thus reducing the thickness of the TV.

But all the tough, thin, and bright advanced glass technology would mean nothing if our devices couldn’t connect to an optically powered wireless network. Corning Optical Communications forms the backbone that connects businesses, homes, and people around the globe. Corning’s optical fiber is a highly transparent strand of glass that transmits light signals with low attenuation (loss of signal power) over long distances, providing nearly limitless bandwidth. This technology – which Corning invented – enables telecommunications service providers to send voice, data, and video at an ever increasing speed.

Because of the global fiber network, you have instant access to voice, information, and video through devices such as smartphones, computers, high-definition TVs, GPS, and game systems through which you get directions, send email, conduct research, join social networks, shop, and download music, movies, and more. It’s not enough, however, to do these things on our mobile devices; now we expect lightning-fast speed. To meet this need, Corning’s fiber has the capability to transfer the equivalent of the entire collection of the U.S. Library of Congress from Florida to London in less than 25 seconds. 

With network usage doubling every few years, worldwide demand for bandwidth is also skyrocketing. Not only do we need fast data transfer, but more and more, we expect reliable call and data capabilities wherever we happen to be.

Our wireless products, enabled by our optical solutions, provide reliable coverage and wireless throughout offices, hotels, and even football stadiums. We recently delivered near record-setting Wi-Fi network performance within Texas A&M University’s Kyle Field, allowing more than 100,000 fans to call, text, and tweet simultaneously during the game. This powerful solution is capable of handling 100,000 photos uploaded to social media every second.

Corning is on the cutting edge of this trend and offers a wide variety of products that meet our growing demand for access anywhere. Using our optical fiber backbone, we’re helping to make dropped calls and slow Internet connections a memory and ubiquitous five-bar cellular coverage a standard for the future.