Corning launches can-stand-the-heat Lotus glass for phones
Sheet hot
One of the key brand names tossed around in relation to smartphone and tablets this year has been Corning's Gorilla Glass. Next year, it may be Lotus Glass.
Corning announced Lotus' commercial availability yesterday, and immediately began touting the display material's suitability for "cutting-edge technologies", including OLED and LCD screens on mobile gadgets.
The manufacturer's pitch is that Lotus' thermal characteristics: it has "a high annealing point that delivers the thermal and dimensional stability… and because of its intrinsic stability, it can withstand the thermal cycles of customer processing better than conventional LCD glass substrates".
In English: it doesn't distort if it gets hot, ensuring that it's good for manufacturing processes that use high temperatures to bond other display components to the glass.
Scientifically, its coefficient of thermal expansion from 0-300°C is a mere 33.9 x 10-7 per ° C.
That makes is much more practical to mount components on the glass itself, eliminating extra layers in the screen sandwich to produce thinner yet no less tough displays.
Corning will offer 2.2 x 2.5m sheets of Lotus Glass in 0.5, 0.6 and 0.7mm thicknesses, ready to be cut to your favourite phone screen size. ®
COMMENTS
There is no WHAT.
The value stated is the <em>fractional</em> expansion per unit of temperature change.
In other words, if you've got a piece of this glass as long as almost 295,000 Bulgarian airbags all lined up, this glass will change its length by one airbag per degree celsius change.
@salerio, errm no.
There is no "WHAT" required, this is a coefficient, it works in any system of units.
(Saying miles per mile per degree Celsius, or metres per metre is redundant.)
However, the author did fail to tell us whether this was a linear, area or volume coefficient, but I'd guess that this is its linear coefficient of expansion, judging by it's size.
Standard units please
light years? furlongs? Please use standard El Reg units. Bulgarian funbags or somesuch.
Given that Lotus Group vs Lotus Motorsport Vs Team Lotus vs Lotus F1 are still battling it out over the name "Lotus", does anyone really want to bring a product to market right now which includes "Lotus" in the title?
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Euan Sheet.
Bounty - not Lotus.
