Consumer Electronics Technologies | Consumer Electronics Glass Technology | Corning

In 2007, a major technology company approached Corning about glass for its first smartphone. Plastic scratched too easily, so they wanted a more durable and elegant material. Drawing on decades of glass expertise, Corning delivered the product within six months and helped create the market for cover glass. To innovate rapidly, Corning scientists and engineers looked at their company’s research from the 1960’s and experimented with more than a hundred glass compositions to come up with the right solution. Since then, Corning® Gorilla® Glass has been designed into more than 8 billion devices by more than 45 major brands.

Corning’s latest flagship glass, Corning® Gorilla® Glass Victus™, is the toughest Gorilla Glass yet. Gorilla Glass Victus significantly improves both drop and scratch performance for the first time ever in the Gorilla Glass family, addressing consumer demand for improved durability.

In lab tests, Gorilla Glass Victus achieved drop performance up to 2 meters when dropped onto hard, rough surfaces. Competitive aluminosilicate glasses from other manufacturers typically fail when dropped from less than 0.8 meters. Gorilla Glass Victus also surpasses Gorilla Glass 6 with up to a 2x improvement in scratch resistance. Additionally, the scratch resistance of Gorilla Glass Victus is up to 4x better than alternative aluminosilicate glasses.

Always evolving, Gorilla Glass enables many of the latest trends in consumer devices.  Since we take our devices everywhere, it is no surprise that many consumers have cited difficulty with reading their devices outdoors on a bright day. Traditional anti-reflection coatings deliver great optics, but they are limited by their inherent low scratch resistance. In fact, even just the force applied to clean a screen would be enough to cause damage. Corning® Gorilla® Glass DX+ glass composites offer great optics and superior scratch resistance, approaching sapphire, while maintaining the legendary toughness and touch sensitivity of Gorilla Glass.  

Additionally, with 5G on the horizon, consumers’ need for higher bandwidth and the ability to wirelessly charge is going to increase. Glass is highly transparent to the required electro-magnetic wavelengths, making it an ideal material because it enables wireless charging through induction and supports high bandwidth radio frequency (RF) transmission. This is the reason you’re seeing close to 100% of premium phones with glass backs, an increasing number of intermediate phones, and even value phones. Corning is working with its customers on the possibility of more devices with virtual all-glass enclosures for smartphones, as well as glass enclosures on notebook computers.