iPhone 5 Will Not Use Cornings Willow Glass But the Next One Might

Corning, the company which develops the durable glass used in Apple’s iPhones, has announced a new development involving a flexible ‘Willow Glass.’ The fledging material is most likely not going to be a part of the next-generation of iPhones, but it might just wrap around the iPhone 6 next year.

A press release dated June 4, 2012 says “Corning Incorporated announced the launch of Corning Willow Glass, an ultra-slim flexible glass, which could revolutionize the shape and form of next-generation consumer electronic technologies.”

The announcement was made at the Society for Information Display’s Display Week, an industry tradeshow in Boston.

It's too soon for this relatively new material to make it into the iPhone 5 launching this fall, but Apple has plenty of time to adopt it for future devices, including the iPhone 6 in 2013.

It is known that Steve Jobs pushed Corning into finishing the development of their strong glass for the iPhone 4. Corning creates “the majority of the glass for iPhone,” according to a report by Apple released in March (via 9to5mac).

The business proved to be flourishing, so they invested more cash into new technologies.

Their new “Willow” glass will reportedly support thinner backplanes and color filters for both organic light emitting diodes (OLED) and liquid crystal displays (LCD). The material hopes to become ubiquitous “in high-performance, portable devices such as smartphones, tablets, and notebook computers,” according to corning.

“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, division vice president and Willow Glass program director.

“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,” added Dr. Chowdhury.

Corning Willow Glass is produced using the company’s proprietary fusion process. Advances in this manufacturing process, Corning says, have made it possible to produce glass that is about the thickness of a sheet of copy paper.

Via: iPhone 5 Will Not Use Cornings Willow Glass But the Next One Might