So
It's basically clear aluminum?
Scotty, beam me up!
Why next iPhone screen could be made of SAPPHIRE - and a steal...
Man-made sapphire could replace Gorilla Glass as the material of choice for scratch-and-crack-resistant mobile phone screens in the near future, according to a recent speculative piece from MIT Technology Review. According to the research university's mag: Manufactured sapphire — a material that’s used as transparent armor …
-
-
-
-
Friday 10th May 2013 15:55 GMT Ru
Re: So
No - it's you Brits and we Australians who can't spell it. It's aluminum
IUPAC prefer -ium, and its kinda their bailiwick.
Some of your scientists decided to change it just so it'd fit in with other "ium"s.
Like molybdenium, lanthanium, tantalium and platinium? Certainly, their efforts at consistency were pretty half-hearted.
-
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 08:24 GMT jai
Assuming steady price of Gorillas?
The assumption here seems to be that Gorilla glass will remain at $3 until and after the sapphire glass industry gets upto speed and reaches the $10 mark? but surely while that is happening, Gorilla glass will continue to get stronger, or it will get cheaper (or both).
Still, that said, being able say my phone has a screen made of aluminium would be cooler than having one made of gorillas...
-
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 08:53 GMT Steve Williams
True, but...
Many watches costing over a couple of hundred pounds use solid sapphire glasses, sawn from sausage shaped ingots and then shaped and polished with diamond tools.
They are quite, but not completely, scratchproof. However they are definitely NOT shatterproof. Any hope of a sapphire crystal surviving hammering or even a significant drop onto concrete is fantasy.
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 09:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: True, but...
Sapphire was used for the windows of Eproms - read only memories that could be erased and reused with ultraviolet light. That brings back memories.
It is indeed very hard, but as you say, far from shatterproof. Indeed, the harder a material, in general, the more likely it is to shatter on impact with another hard material, because the impact energy is dissipated in a smaller space. A lot depends on the crystal structure.
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 09:47 GMT Dave 126
Re: True, but...
>They are quite, but not completely, scratch-proof. However they are definitely NOT shatterproof. Any hope of a sapphire crystal surviving hammering or even a significant drop onto concrete is fantasy
It depends how it is used. A phone screen is thinner than a watch crystal, and it is only the very outer layer that you want to be hard- maybe it could be combined with a more flexible material. I'm thinking of case-hardened spanners, which are hard on the outside, more flexible on the inside so that they don't break when dropped like a drill bit will.
Many Omega watches use sapphire for the watch crystal but the models used in space used an acrylic-like material... acrylic would be less likely to shatter due to extremes in temperature, and even if it did it would be preferable to tiny shards of sapphire floating around in an enclosed environment.
Back down on earth, the things likely to scratch a sapphire watch face are harder stones in jewellery, diamond dust (if you've been a diamond blade in a disc cutter) and sometimes the anti-slip coating at the bottom of swimming pools.
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 16:13 GMT goldcd
I was think along the same lines
I've got a pretty nondescript Omega I've worn every day for the last ooh ~ decade. Steel bracelet has a nice 'patina' from the casual abuse I've subjected it to, but the glass (which is nicely convex and proud on top) is still absolutely flawless.
Always wondered why phones didn't just use the same stuff - and now understand - and can't wait until they do.
-
-
-
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 13:59 GMT Yesnomaybe
Re: Watches
My Omega has a saphire for glass, and I can tell you that when I accidentally hit it with the edge of a spinning grinding disc on an angle-grinder, it saved my wrist from unsightly abarasion, and although metal was smeared accross the glass, this came off, and there was no scratch in the saphire. Incredible stuff, I'll be wanting a phone with that stuff as a screen.
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 16:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Watches
This could explain why my Casio waveceptor is still useable after being variously wacked into brass door handles and steel scaffold poles. And I'd wondered why metal was leaving marks on the "glass" that just polished off. It's predecessor was retired after an encounter with the bottom of a swimming pool.
Maybe they should stop wasting time on sapphire, and move straight to make mobile phone screen out of whatever swimming pool coatings are made of, which is clearly the hardest material in the universe.
-
-
-
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 08:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
whyPhone
Why specifically say the iPhone? There's nothing in this article to suggest that Apple are working on this, or are likely to be the first to use it.
In fact, it's almost certain that the "next iPhone", due out this year will *not* have a sapphire screen - making the title of this otherwise good article doubly stupid.
My guess is the writer of the article was not the writer of the idiotic linkbait headline.
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 08:40 GMT DaLo
Re: whyPhone
Yeah, also wondering this. I thought when the author said " few chats with people who would know," I thought the Register had found someone with links to people at Apple.
However the article doesn't mention that Apple are going to use this technology or looking at it.
The author seems to have good knowledge of the industry and is providing a very factual and informative article but the whole premise of the article that the next iPhone could be using this undermines it. No evidence (even the "market analyst" quote is mentioned).
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 12:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: whyPhone
Maybe because Apple tends to be on the cutting edge when it comes to materials and designs? okay, some of these designs are bling.
But lets not forget that it was Jobs who introduced the phone market to Gorilla glass when he went looking for a cover for the iPhone 1's screen. Corning had discovered Gorilla glass many years ago and put it on the shelf.
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 18:34 GMT graeme leggett
Re: whyPhone
some articles online say that Corning had invented a tough glass (Chemcor) in the 1960s which they stopped producing in the 1990s. Come the smartphone age, they started thinking what they could do, went back to Chemcor and came up with a new (and patentable) formulation which is Gorilla glass.
-
-
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 08:47 GMT Tom_
Re: whyPhone
Because the author was using "iPhone" as shorthand for "mobile phone at the expensive end of the spectrum where design is considered a significant factor in peoples' purchasing decisions".
Take a step back and try to stop taking everything so literally. Language is able to convey more subtlety than that if you allow it.
-
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 10:54 GMT GoingGoingGone
Re: Definitely not the first
And so did the more mundane (in comparison to Vertu) Nokia 8800 back in 2006. They even named it one of the variants "Sapphire Arte". If they had only announced it with a flamboyant presentation, patented it and reminded the world how they were 5 years ahead of anybody else...
I'm getting myself a 8800 sirocco just to snottily pull it out of my pocket whenever a twat brandishes a shiny new gadget pontificating about its revolutionary sapphire screen and him being the first human being to ever hold one.
Negative points for the author 'cos of the Apple baitlink + apparently not having a frigging clue that sapphire was used in phone screens even before the iPhone had seen the light of day.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Friday 10th May 2013 16:03 GMT Ru
Re: Fixed @ skelband
I'm still a bit confused: what are the "slags" being hunted for in this instance?
What might look like a common slag to the unitiated may in fact be a valuable ore, and worth a penny or two to the
pimpprospector who stakes an appropriate claim and has a client in mind with suitably niche tastes.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 08:35 GMT Voland's right hand
Fantastic
We shall all congratulate Apple with innovating this new and wonderful innovation in the world of consumer electronics. This is so exciting and such a good reason to buy this new and innovative gadget. I just cannot wait until the hype wave starts rising and all the usual suspects try to ride it under the rainbow and into the sunset.
They will call fossilized grumpy old men those of us who can remember that Motorola KRZR K1 (2006) shipped with a Al203 glass (and you could use it as a hammer or chisel - best built phone I ever seen, pity the software was major s***age). Actually my Poljot high school watch from 30 years ago used it and so does my current Fossil.
It is the usual Apple - taking an old, tried, tested tech, twisting the arm of a few manufacturers to mass-produce it and doing the mother of all marketing campaigns to pretend to have innovated it.
-
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 12:53 GMT Imsimil Berati-Lahn
Re: I saw what you did there... All I have to say on the matter is...
All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension.
Trans-uranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life.
Medium atomic weights are available.
Gold, lead, copper, jet, diamond, radium, sapphire, silver and steel.
Sapphire and steel have been assigned.
-
-
-
Friday 3rd May 2013 07:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sapphire glass is already in use on the iPhone
I agree the fact Apple already uses sapphire in the iPhone 5 makes it more likely that Apple uses it for the screen than anyone else. On the other hand Apple has a deal with the maker of Liquid Metal giving them an exclusive license in the field of consumer devices and used it for the SIM tool a couple phones ago....and nothing since.
Just because they used it for the camera lens doesn't mean they'll find it practical to use it for the screen. Remember the complaints about the purple tint in photos showing up at certain angles? Yep, the sapphire's responsible. Apple is big on very accurate color reproduction on their displays, they would have to find a way around this before they'd consider using it for their display glass.
It would be interesting if they went to a Liquid Metal body and sapphire screen. The entire phone would be essentially scratchproof, though the screen itself would likely be not all that much different in shatter resistance than glass, nor would the body be wildly less susceptible to dents than the aluminum used in the iPhone 5. There is unfortunately typically a relationship between the hardness of a material and its resistance to shattering. If you want something to not shatter, you want it to be flexible, not stiff. Flexible things typically will either dent or scratch depending on the type of flexibility. If they're flexible but spring back then they're the kind of thing more likely to shatter due to fatigue. Kind of a vicious material circle.
Scratchproof, shatterproof AND dent proof? Not going to happen. There will never be a perfect material for cell phone screens or bodies that is both resistant to scratches from typical use (pockets, purses and the things normally kept within) as well as able to survive a drop from ear height onto concrete without scratches or dents from all likely impact angles. Well, shouldn't say never, nanotechnology may save the day, but we haven't found anything yet that can do this, even at the "crazy rich guy" end of the spectrum, let alone the "we can build it for $200-ish and sell it for $600-ish" range that iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S* play in.
-
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 11:32 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Silica <> glass
Silica or quartz is not (often) a true glass. Fused silica is used in optics, but due to the high temperatures needed for glass transition it is limited in its use. Typical glass combines silica (about 75%) with sodium and calcium oxides. So silica is the main constituent in many cases, but not the whole story. Most silica typically has a proper crystalline structure, and is not glass-like in many properties (e.g. thermal conductivity of glass is typically closer to that of certain liquids than that of crystalline silica or carborundum (alumina)).
</pedantry>
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 11:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Squares that look round
I was assuming the ingot was a cylinder?
Slice that through the vertical, then you have two square surfaces from which you can slice (admittedly smaller and smaller) square slivers/slice
In the short term (low yield) the diameter of the ingot only needs to be a little bigger than the width of the screen you want to make, by a little longer. Lots of wastage, but probably do able with the current "fat candle" ingots.
-
Thursday 2nd May 2013 13:01 GMT Dazed and Confused
I don't know what size candles you use for Slag bait but
When I used to work in chip research we were baking them on 3" diameter wafers of Sapphire back in the early 80s. SOS had some significant advantages if you're concerned with making stuff rad hard, silicon is for softies who live on the ground.
I thought the production side of the business was using bigger wafers even back then.
Typing Silicon on Sapphire into Google shows an ad at the top for 300mm wafers! So they could already make iPod/any chosen brand of fondle slab screens if anyone cared enough to try.
I remember finding a whole load of old 2" wafers in the back of an old cupboard and one of the managers taking them with the intention of making the world most bling lamp shade.
-
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
-
Monday 6th May 2013 19:47 GMT John Savard
Lanthanum oxide
Lanthanum oxide doesn't make glass more transparent. But it does allow the production of glasses with high refractive index and low dispersion, which are desirable characteristics for designing lenses which produce good images (the lens doesn't split the colors as much, so it doesn't need as thick a flint correcting element, and the lens doesn't need to be as thick itself to bend the light for a given focal length). High-quality astronomical eyepieces, therefore, often use elements which contain that material.
-
Thursday 16th May 2013 12:54 GMT cray74
Artificial sapphire
Sapphire watch faces are an old technology, grown by flame deposition (Verneuil process, 1902AD) or by growing a boule from a tub of molten aluminum oxide (Czochralski process, 1916). The latter can produce bars of aluminum oxide up to 400mm diameter and is a workhorse of the watch industry, which has been using sapphire watch faces for decades. Replacement sapphire watch faces can be as cheap as $15 (US).
While sapphire is a fantastically hard material, and thus more scratch resistant than Gorilla glass, it is not particularly tough (crack resistant). It is a poor man's ceramic armor, displaced by silicon carbide, silicon nitride, and boron nitride in (opaque) armor applications.
On the other hand, Gorilla glass's virtue is its toughness (by transparent glass / ceramic standards), which suits it for thin, lightweight phone screens. If you use an equally thin sheet of sapphire in your phone, I'm betting it'll crack more often even while resisting scratches. (And if you try to drive nails with a sapphire phone screen then you're going to have a nail embedded in your phone before long. )
I've liked the idea of sapphire for phone screens for a while because of its history in watches. But phones use thinner, larger sheets than a robust Rolex "crystal" in a thick, small watch case. There'll be more bending and torque than in a watch.
So, I plan to sit out the sapphire phone screen race until a few more generations have come and gone and engineers have ironed out the vulnerabilities.
And a nitpick: sapphire, aluminum oxide, is not "transparent aluminium" (or "solid oxygen") anymore than water is "liquid hydrogen." Aluminium oxide is a chemical compound with completely different properties than its base elements. Different melting point, different strength, different hardness, different chemical behavior, etc.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
