Corning introduces flexible Willow glass for smartphones

Today at the Society for Information Display’s Display Week tradeshow in Boston, the maker of Gorilla glass unveiled its newest creation, Corning Willow glass. It’s a flexible glass that can be used for mobile devices that bends, twists and rolls up without snapping and was formulated with touch sensors and other electronic elements in mind.

Willow glass has the potential to usher in entirely new product categories based on flexible display technology. It’s super slim, which will help vendors manufacture products that are thinner and lighter than ever before. It also supports thinner backplanes and color filters for OLED (organic light-emitting) and LCD (liquid crystal) displays, both of which are standard for smartphones and tablets.

“Displays become more pervasive each day and manufacturers strive to make both portable devices and larger displays thinner. Corning Willow Glass provides the substrate performance to maintain device quality in a thin and light form factor,” said Dr. Dipak Chowdhury, program director of Willow glass and division vice president. “Currently manufacturing in a sheet-to-sheet process, we expect Corning Willow Glass to eventually allow customers to switch to high-throughput, efficient roll-to-roll processing, a long-awaited industry milestone.”

Corning is currently working with certain vendors to aid in manufacturing projects using Willow glass for shipment hopefully by the end of the year.

The company also unveiled Gorilla Glass 2 at CES 2012 in January, the new and improved version of its highly regarded ultra-durable smartphone glass that’s 20 percent thinner than its predecessor. Samsung utilized it in the Galaxy S III.

[via PhoneScoop]