In conversation with Jaymin Amin, Corning Gorilla Glass, and Technical Guruji

The main concerns that they have around the durability of the cover glass. All to do with the breakages in the cover glass when the phones are being dropped. That's the number one concern. And then the second concern that they have is around the scratch on the cover glass as well. So those are two primary concerns. What we see more of is people will live with a scratch, but obviously they can't live with the break, or at least not for extended periods of time. You still see people carrying phones around with scratches.

I believe so. I think it typically becomes a buying preference, right? But as Gaurav said, a lot of his viewers often talk about the first question they ask is: does the phone have Gorilla Glass or not? It happens over here as well. We are a small town community here in Corning, and when you go to the local store, the local Best Buy, you find a lot of other local people who are not familiar with the phones, who don't work at Corning, asking the employees in the store if a particular phone has Gorilla Glass on it or not. I think it's the same across the world at the moment.

First is to maybe get a smartphone that comes with that kind of protection, and second, use a case.

I think the backs need safety protection for sure, right? Glass is becoming more prominent on the backs primarily because of wireless charging over the last few years. And as wireless charging increased, and also as Apple started looking at glass on the back, I think the design trends have also evolved into using glass on the backside.

I would want to add something here. The reason that I don't use any case on my phone is because I would want to use my devices the way they were designed to be used. A brand will never make a phone that they assume people are going to put a case on it. So being a glass-backed phone, it increases the premiumness of that phone. Now along with that premiumness, safety has to be there. If it's just for the looks, if it feels premium but it breaks in a while, then what's the point of getting a glass phone? So if you get a glass phone, then again it has to come with the same kind of protection just to be sure that you're going to use it for time to come.

Gorilla Glass really has set the trend for durability, for optical performance, for dielectric performance. We started in this field back in 2007, and gradually had to evolve different parameters in the glass chemistry in order to meet the evolving needs of the industry. If you consider where we were back in 2007, the glass that we were producing was actually going to be thicker. A lot of the durability is controlled by the thickness, but the way we have been able to come down in that thickness, the way the OEMs have been able to design that, is because we keep improving the durability of our glass through the composition changes that we keep making and through the ion exchange strengthening process improvements that we keep making. We've got a very large R&D organization that tries to stay ahead by two to three years. We work together with the marketing organizations around Corning to try and understand the customer requirements, their roadmaps, and try and evolve our products.

The toughness of a glass is determined by two factors: one is the chemistry of the glass, the chemical composition, and the second thing is the strengthening process that you use for the glass. In addition to all that, how you handle the glass, how you treat the glass as it goes through the finishing process, it goes through all of the downstream processes that are required for inking. We have been on this problem since the early days of Gorilla, evolving the composition and learning about what makes the composition be really tough from a standpoint of its native strength without any strengthening processes. We look at different chemistries, we look at how the glass bonding structure is, and we look at how all of that plays into the different downstream processes as well. Then we create the glass itself. Once we create the glass, then we also look at different strengthening processes. We create these very deep compression layers on the surface of the glass. Glass is weak in tension but it becomes really strong in compression. So we create these deep compression regions in the glass, and with those deep compression regions we get additional strength on the glass surface such that if a flaw goes into the glass, it stays enveloped in that compressive region and doesn't penetrate all the way through. So that's how we work, and that's how glasses are created, that's how Gorilla is made to be additionally tough compared to other glasses.

When we create new glasses, we also create pucks which are essentially very similar to a phone but they don't have all the housing, all the internal systems of a phone. They have something that simulates a battery and has the same weight as the rest of the components. So we create them, then we do drop testing. And when we do controlled drop testing, it's very important to understand which orientations your phone breaks in and the maximum exposure that the glass gets. When it gets impacted on the bezel, the bezel gets pushed in and it jams the phone glass cover, but the actual damage that's worst case is actually in the flat face drop tests that you can do.

It's the toughest Gorilla Glass from a standpoint of the fact that it's got 2x better scratch performance than our previous generation glasses. The scratch performance is actually measured using a new indenter, the loop indenter. It is a diamond tip that gets brought down onto a piece of glass at a certain load and then it gets dragged across the piece of glass at a certain rate, and we keep doing that at different loads and different rates until we see a big chip out in the glass. It's a standard test that started years ago in the architectural industry and got pushed into consumer electronics as well. With that test, Victus is 2x better than our previous generation glasses, and about 4x better than competitive glasses. The second thing we do is drop testing. We can do drops of about two meters with Victus, whereas our previous generation glass like Gorilla Glass 6 was about 1.6 meters in height. Competitive glasses typically fail at less than a meter on that particular drop test. So with that comes our claim that it's the toughest Gorilla Glass that we have produced to date.

Absolutely. Because of the improvements that we've made where we've simultaneously improved both drop and scratch performance, which we haven't done previously. And therefore we ought to call this glass something new, something different. So we did an internal survey and came up with Victus, which we all actually really liked. Victus in Latin basically means life. For us, Gorilla Glass is a way of life, innovation is a way of life. So all of that really spoke to something that we wanted to convey.