

  (Source: Flawless Facets)
Sapphire would be three times as hard as Gorilla Glass







Gorilla Glass
The current market leader is Corning's Gorilla Glass.



GT Advanced Tech
[Image Source: GT Advanced Tech/ExtremeTech]


Sources: MIT Review, CNN [Corning Response]

Comments     Threshold


RE: Incorrect
By deksman2 on 3/22/2013 5:21:54 AM , Rating: 2
I agree with this assessment.
The technology is not new.
But, I would have preferred they used synthetic diamonds (which also can be produced in abundance since decades ago, and it was in the mid 90-ies it became practical for electronic chip use and overall usage in computers).

Technologies/materials like this are decades old actually.
The core difference is that the market takes time to find monetarily cheap ways of using them (which has nothing to do with our technological ability to create something in abundance with high energy/resource/technology efficiency, from the get go).
Market based economy is holding us back severely... and to top it off, many won't even use new technologies from the get go because its more profitable to 'milk' outdated technologies and make revisions for as long as they can.

That and the artificial notion of 'cost' is coming down at much faster pace the more automated our production is (which is nearly everything), so the rate of new materials/technologies trickling down to others even in the monetary system is accelerating (but the present socio-economic system is stupid/unsustainable since it creates large amounts of waste and doesn't recycle nearly anything - we had the ability to use all the landfills for material/tool/technology creation since the late 19th century, and there would be 0 need to extract new ones from the Earth since we knew back then to create synthetic materials with superior properties using less energy and raw material overall).

RE: Incorrect
By deksman2 on 3/22/2013 5:22:39 AM , Rating: 2
I would say this is a step in the right direction.

RE: Incorrect
By Solandri on 3/22/2013 6:18:44 AM , Rating: 5
1) They're also used as bulletproof glass panes in attack helicopters. And I guarantee you those are bigger than a smartphone screen.

2) Al2O3 is called corundum. To pick up the characteristic blue color of sapphires, it has to have certain impurities. Different impurities give it a red color, which we call rubies. But the pure, colorless variety is called corundum.

3) Corundum is more or less the natural state of aluminum (though usually not in crystalline form). Elemental aluminum is at a high energy state and reacts easily with oxygen, so is almost impossible to find in nature. The aluminum foil you have in your home is actually aluminum with a very thin layer of corundum surrounding it. The aluminum reacts with oxygen in the air to form this layer, which seals it off from the air and prevents further corrosion. (A similar thing happens with iron, except iron oxide, aka rust, doesn't seal the iron from the air, and so the rusting continues.)

4) Synthetic corundum crystals are relatively easy to make. You melt a bunch of Al2O3, put in a seed crystal, and let it slowly grow much like how silicon wafers are made. Synthetic diamonds are made much the same way, except you need pressures of about 50,000x atmospheric pressure before the crystals will form. That increases the cost tremendously and limits the size of the crystals you can grow. Mostly all you can make are industrial size diamonds (i.e. powder for coating drill bits and such). There's a vapor deposition method widely being researched, but with limited success.

RE: Incorrect
Can you grow a whole phone out of it?

RE: Incorrect
By ShieTar on 3/22/2013 10:39:37 AM , Rating: 3
2) Technically correct, but synthetic corundum is almost exclusively sold as "sapphire" anyways.

4) There is a difference between poly-crystalline and mono-crystalline Al2O3, both in ease of production and in optical/mechanical properties. Poly-crystalline is much cheaper, but also breaks easier along the crystal barriers.

