Tougher Glass for Rougher Falls: Gorilla Glass 4 is here!

Is the new saviour of smartphone in town?

Those precious devices are like our babies. They go eat with us, sleep with us and go with us everywhere. But sometimes, they also escape our grasps and plummet to the ground. The time freezes as they fall, and you find yourself praying (or cursing) hard, for the phone to not shatter in pieces. It’s not often that they entirely survive the impact and we end up carrying around a broken screen and a broken heart.

Gorilla Glass, which initially landed in 2007, remains prevalent among cell phone manufacturers including Samsung which utilizes it on its Galaxy smartphones and, allegedly, also Apple, particularly on the grounds that it offers the promise, if not always the reality, of strength and a scratch-and break-proof screen.

This 4th generation of Corning’s ultra-thin glass is potentially even stronger than previous generations. And to get all the way up here, Corning had to look down at hundreds of new and broken phones. According to Cliff Hund, President of Corning East Asia, the company analyzed the fracture patterns on these phones, looking for the primary cause, which turned out to be “the result of sharp-particle contact” often on asphalt and concrete.

Corning then bought a hundred new phones and started dropping them on, no, not asphalt, but 180-grit sandpaper, which better simulated the roads and pavements we find across the city. In the end Corning discovered that a face drop would be the toughest test “because it has highest degree of contact with rough particle surface and highest degree of stress.”

While Gorilla Glass 4 still uses Corning’s trademark fusion draw process, it does feature a slightly different chemical process and different design and processing formulation (Corning likes to keep its secrets). Gorilla Glass 4, at 0.4 millimeter, is no thinner than Gorilla Glass 3.



The resultant glass is, according to Corning, a though nut which can survive that dreaded face drop (from a height of 1 meter), 80% of the time. The cheap Chinese phones using Soda Lime glass, which is more or less regular glass, breaks 100% of the time, said Hund. He also noted that Gorilla Glass 4 outperforms the alumina silicate glass composite used on some other smartphones.

Whither sapphire

How does Gorilla Glass 4 compare to the Apple’s choice: Sapphire Glass?

“We study all competitive materials and we’ve studied Sapphire quite a bit,” said Hund. “What we find is that when you subject it to abrasion, to naked eye it’s incredibly scratch resistant, even beyond Gorilla, but beyond the naked eye, microscopic, abrasion does occur.” Sapphire Glass ends being more vulnerable to breakage in a fall when this happens.

Gorilla Glass is lighter, offers better light transmission and takes far less energy to manufacture, claims Hund. Corning expects to commercialize the new Glass before the end of this year.

How they did it? Have a look at the Testing Video released by Corning®