Willow Glass: ultra-thin glass can ‘wrap’ around devices

June 6, 2012 | Source: BBC News
corning-willing-glass-display

(Credit: Corning)

A new type of flexible ultra-thin glass has been unveiled by the firm that developed Gorilla Glass, currently used to make screens of many mobile devices.

Willow Glass can be “wrapped” around a device, said developer Corning.

A prototype is as thin as a sheet of paper, and the company said that it can be made to be just 0.05mm thick  — thinner than the current 0.2mm or 0.5mm displays.

The material used to make Willow Glass is the result of the firm’s glass-making process called Fusion. The technique is melting the ingredients at 500C, and then producing a continuous sheet that can be rolled out in a mechanism similar to a traditional printing press.

This roll-to-roll method is much easier and faster for mass production than the sheet-to-sheet process normally used to make super-thin glass, the firm said.

In the future, Willow Glass may replace the already widely-used Gorilla Glass, found on many smartphones and tablets.

Other super-thin materials include:

  • Graphene:  prototypes of flexible touchscreens made out of graphene have already been developed. Such displays could even give the user “sensational” feedback.
  • “Electronic paper”: Scientists from the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University and Arizona State University’s Motivational Environments Research group created a millimeters-thick prototype flexible smartphone in 2011, made of “electronic paper,” using the same e-ink technology as found in Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, bonded to flex sensors and a touchscreen that interpreted drawings and text written on it.