Corning® Gorilla® Glass | Resetting the Mobile Device Glass Standard | Corning

Corning has always been the market leader in strengthened mobile device glass since the early days of smart phones. Always first to advance the performance of flagship device glass, Corning intends to once again reset the standard for product performance in summer 2020 with Corning^® Gorilla^® Glass Victus™.

The company’s history of strengthening glass stretches back decades. It’s that history, and the knowledge that comes with it, that allows Corning to remain at the forefront of work to make glass a stronger, more durable material. While Gorilla® Glass may be the latest of Corning’s efforts to make glass more resistant to the wear, tear and stresses of everyday life, it’s far from the first.

More than 100 years ago, Corning’s borosilicate glass was the basis for its PYREX^® product lines. Because of the glass’s composition, it was not only highly chemically durable but also capable of withstanding an incredibly wide range of temperatures without succumbing to thermal shock, which made it ideal for cookware and labware applications.

Decades later, CorningWare^® was developed, furthering the ability of Corning’s glass-ceramic cookware to withstand rapid changes in temperature. These innovations laid the foundation for later work by the company to find ways to make glass even more durable.

In the 1960’s, Corning developed Chemcor^® glass, a chemically strengthened glass that was intended to be used in phone booths, prison windows, eyeglasses and automobile windshields. Through ion exchange, the surface of the glass became highly compressed, and therefore less prone to the introduction of damage and the application of stresses that could lead to breakage. Chemcor paved the way for the production of thinner glass through chemical strengthening.

In 2005, Corning executives realized that strong, durable glass would be needed on variety of mobile electronics applications. Markets demanded a cover glass for mobile consumer electronics devices that both reduces the likelihood that flaws are generated and the effect of such flaws on glass strength and breakage. While Chemcor was not the right product for mobile consumer electronics, it and the history of chemical strengthening offered scientists an entry-point.

The result was Gorilla Glass: a different glass composition and product than Chemcor. Significant compositional and ion-exchange processes were invented to achieve superior product characteristics including outstanding damage resistance and retained strength, while also optimizing the glass for production on Corning’s proprietary fusion-draw manufacturing process.

The first generation of Gorilla Glass was released on first-generation smartphones in 2007. Today, Gorilla Glass has served as a cover glass on more than 8 billion mobile devices around the world. That journey has continued as Corning prepares to unveil the seventh generation of its flagship cover glass this summer.