Corning Is Developing Gorilla Glass for Foldable Phones

The first foldablesmartphonescoming to market will be very expensive and devoid of glass protecting the display. That's because glass can't bend enough to allow a phone to fold like a book. At least, it can't yet.

AsWired reports(Opens in a new window), the first-generation of folding smartphones will ship with a plastic polymer covering the display. Plastic can achieve a tight bend radius repeatedly without incurring any damage, but it's much worse than glass when it comes to offering a hard-wearing surface on which to tap and swipe. Scratches are inevitable, meaning glass remains the preferred option.

Corning, the maker of Gorilla Glass, is promising to solve the problem with a new type of folding glass. However, we're going to be waiting a couple of years for the manufacturing process to be perfected.

Glass can already be bent, but not enough to achieve the tight bend radius required for a book-like fold. At the moment Corning can offer customers a much tighter bend radius or stronger glass, but not both. When it can achieve both, we'll get foldable phones shipping with Gorilla Glass.

Corning is combining its expertize in Gorilla Glass, which offers ahighly-durable and drop resistant glasscover for phones that don't bend, with Willow Glass, which is designed as anultra-thin, lightweight, and bendable/rollable glass. The difficulty lies in the manufacturing process. For Willow Glass, it requires dipping the glass in a salt solution. Salt is corrosive to electronics, so it doesn't work with glass that requires integrated transistors.

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John Bayne, senior vice president and general manager of Corning's Gorilla Glass division, explains, "In a display application, you're putting transistors on the glass. Transistors hate salt: Sodium, potassium, anything from the salt family will eat away a transistor. For this family of glasses to work, you have to have these components in the glass that are incompatible with transistors."

Without a glass front, foldable phones risk remaining a niche set of devices because they simply can't be made durable enough to compete with the more typical slab phones. But you can't bet against Corning and other glass manufacturers solving the problem because they know foldable phones could be as popular, if not more so than today'ssmartphonesdue to the increase in screen size they promise while remaining pocket-friendly.