There’s no shame in cracking your smartphone’s screen. It happens, especially to the bold and the caseless. Better to focus on all the times it doesn’t happen, those fumbles where the phone hits the floor and bounces back unscathed. For that, you can thank Gorilla Glass[1], the miracle material found in every iPhone and Android flagship display for over a decade. And Gorilla Glass 6, announced this week, isn’t just tougher—it’s built for the future of phones.
Start with what Gorilla Glass 6 can do. Corning, the company that makes it, says it has focused here on durability over time. In its own testing, the next generation of Gorilla Glass held up over 15 drops from a height of 1 meter on rough surfaces. That’s up to twice what Gorilla Glass 5, released two years ago, could manage.
“That’s what we were trying to solve, that kind of competitive, continuous drop,” says Corning division vice president Scott Forester. By contrast, Gorilla Glass 5 prioritized surviving a single drop from what Forester calls “selfie height.”
To accomplish that priority shift without making trade-offs, Corning turned not just to clever chemistry, but an entirely new composition. Specifically, Corning increased what’s called the compressive stress of the glass, which is what helps it withstand impacts.
“There’s always two fundamental components for Gorilla Glass. One is the actual glass composition at the atomic level, which elements are in the glass itself. And what we do is combine it with an ion exchange process, basically a strengthening process,” says Forester. The glass gets dipped into a molten bath of salts, where sodium ions leave while larger potassium ions enter. “You’re jamming them into the glass. And what that does is create this compressive...