Corning Lands Iris Glass Win for Upcoming Line of Dell ‘Ultra-Thin’ Monitors
Dell will use Corning’s Iris glass as the light-guide plate for an upcoming line of “ultra-thin and ultra-bright monitors,” Corning CEO Wendell Weeks told his company’s annual investor conference Friday. Corning introduced Iris glass as the basis for light-guide plates at CES two years ago as a means of enabling ultra-thin LCD TVs that could better compete with the form factor of OLED sets (see 1501090015).
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The Dell monitors with Iris glass “will feature design and performance that will truly set them apart,” said Weeks. “So Iris is breaking through in the display market. Whether it becomes a breakout really depends on the breadth of adoption by major TV brands.” Corning estimates “there has been a sevenfold increase in the number of Iris sets in development” since it introduced Iris at the January 2015 CES, Weeks said. “Three brands are now selling Iris sets, with more coming out this year.”
Iris, which replaces the polymer that conventionally has been used in the light-guide plates of most LCD TVs, allows set designers to create TVs that are less than 0.2 inches thick “with vanishing bezels,” Weeks said. “That means a 60-inch TV with stunning image quality that is as thin as a premium smartphone.”
Corning expects “steady” growth in demand for LCD TV glass over the next several years, “driven primarily by increasing screen size,” Weeks said. “For us, what matters is display viewing area, where LCD will remain predominant for the foreseeable future.” The company estimates that LCD accounts for 97 percent of the display viewing area of all devices produced and shipped, he said. Though OLED has only 3 percent share, “OLED still interests us,” he said. It’s in “small screens” for smartphones where OLED “has potential,” he said. “As we predicted many years ago, OLED technology is gaining strength in this space because of power advantages and the potential for conformable and flexible displays.”
OLED today accounts for about 24 percent of the display viewing area of small screens, “and we expect that to double over the next several years,” said Weeks. “What people often don’t realize is the glass utilization for OLEDs is basically the same as for LCDs, but the increasingly demanding manufacturing processes for flexible OLEDs creates the need for an even higher-performance glass.” The Lotus NXT glass that Corning introduced at Display Week two years ago “features exceptional thermal and dimensional stability to optimize the production of OLEDs,” said Weeks. “Lotus outperforms competitive options by a wide margin and customers love it,” he said, noting Samsung picked Lotus glass for the flexible OLED screens for the Galaxy S8 and S8+. “Although OLEDs are and will remain a very small portion of display viewing area, our leadership in Lotus means that small-screen OLED growth is a positive for us,” he said.
For Corning, the “superior drop performance” of its fifth-generation Gorilla Glass for mobile devices “also opens up opportunities to increase the amount of glass per phone,” said Weeks. “One trend we are particularly excited about is the growing use of glass on the back of smartphones.” Though plastics and metals until now have been the “primary materials” used for the backs of smartphones, “glass offers design advantages, including more elegant form factors and better scratch resistance,” he said.
Device makers also are starting “to incorporate new capabilities” into the backs of their smartphones, including wireless charging and faster data transmission, Weeks said. “The physical and electromagnetic properties of glass make it particularly well suited for these capabilities and eliminate the design and performance tradeoffs associated with plastic and metal.”
As a result, “we are already seeing more glass on the backs of devices,” such as the Galaxy S8 and the Google Pixel smartphones, Weeks said. “This is great news for Corning and at least conceptually doubles our addressable market. And since the backs of phones don’t have the same optical transparency requirements as the front, we can provide designers with new possibilities.” For example, Corning has begun experimenting with “true color glass ceramics or vibrant Gorilla Glass with photorealistic images,” he said. “These options provide more value to the customer and to us. Commercialization is early, but the response is really encouraging.”
Conventional smartphones typically feature a single piece of Gorilla Glass on the front of the device, said Weeks. “With the trend toward glass phone backs, we are now seeing more phones with two pieces of Gorilla Glass, and the adoption of glass screen protectors could soon mean three pieces of Gorilla Glass on the exterior.” Though not all phones will use three pieces of glass, “the opportunity to triple our total addressable market is very exciting,” he said.