Consumer Electronics Technologies | Corning

Innovating the next generation of consumer electronics: from the thin, tough glass that enhances your mobile device to the emerging technologies that enhance your world

By pioneering glass that is thin, lightweight, damage resistant, and responsive to touch, Corning is helping transform the way people use their smartphones. Through the company’s Mobile Consumer Electronics (MCE) Market-Access Platform, Corning continues its legacy of innovation with its market-leading cover glasses as well as glass and optics for semiconductor products that enhance device performance, deliver new connectivity features, enable new designs, and support immersive user experiences with augmented and mixed reality wearables and precise 3D sensing and facial authentication.

Built on History

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.

Gorilla Glass Today

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.

Enabling the Future of Mobile Consumer Electronics

Corning Capabilities for Augmented Reality

Expanding MCE Market Opportunities

Corning is collaborating with Otterbox on a line of screen protectors featuring Corning’s advantaged glass technology which offers additional protection for those consumers who would like to protect their investment. The Otterbox enhanced Amplify Glass screen protection line featuring Corning’s glass is the first and only screen protector currently in the market that incorporates an EPA-registered antimicrobial glass. The antimicrobial property of the screen protectors is embedded into the glass, so it is able to maintain its damage resistance, optical clarity and touch sensitivity for the life of the product.

We are also partnering with the leading consumer electronics manufacturers and material suppliers on new, emerging capabilities, such as augmented and mixed reality (AR/MR) wearables and 3D sensing technology for facial authentication to reshape the world’s digital experience once again. The inherent properties of glass, paired with our industry-leading material science and optical design expertise, make Corning uniquely suited to help customers deliver increasingly demanding functionality for consumer electronics and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Corning Advanced Optics' high quality materials and supporting capabilities are delivering the next-generation of life-changing innovations.

What’s Next

We are continuing to look at new manufacturing platforms and processes for our high-quality glass products and will continue to focus on incorporating more of our best-in-class glasses into smartphones, laptops, wearables, tablets, and the most advanced microchips. We are focused on innovations that we believe can help solve some of the technology challenges facing the first generation of foldable products and developing solutions to support next-gen semiconductor manufacturing for more compact packaging of memory chips to enable smarter consumer devices. We believe that future product roadmaps will likely incorporate more glass-based materials and optical solutions as well as enhanced touch capabilities and longer battery life, all areas where Corning can offer its industry-leading products and expertise.

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