(CNN Business) - Corning Gorilla Glass is the name of a brand that consumers may or may not be familiar with, but they have almost certainly come into contact with the company's products.
The company has created the glasses for a range of well-known consumer products, from the first Pyrex baking dishes to the first glass display on an iPhone (and 8 billion other mobile devices worldwide).
Corning is now releasing its new version of Gorilla Glass — Gorilla Glass Victus, named for the Latin word “live” - which it says will make phone screens much more resistant to scratches and breaks. The company claims that phone displays made from this glass should be able to withstand drops of up to nearly two meters (six feet) without cracking.
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Innovation is crucial at a time when consumers hold on to their phones longer, and as equipment manufacturers increasingly seek to design thinner and more flexible mobile devices. The announcement provides information on the development cycle of new mobile devices.
"(Phone manufacturers) need better glass to make designs more attractive and fresher," John Bayne, senior vice president and general manager of mobile consumer electronics at Corning, told CNN Business. But those designs "expose the phones to more damage, so we have to make better glass," he explained.
Corning's research shows that durability is the number 2 priority for consumers when buying a new phone, more important than battery life, camera quality, or screen size.
Typically, new iterations of the phone screen glass focus on one piece of the puzzle: making the phone screens survive drop-outs or are more scratch resistant. In recent years, Corning has focused primarily on improving the ability of its glass to withstand falls. Those improvements helped the screens of the phones last longer, but also meant that the phones were more likely to get scratches at some point during their lifetime.
"The phones that suffered drops may end up being broken phones, but as we developed better glass, the phones survived more falls but also showed more visible scratches, which can affect the usability of the devices," Bayne said in a statement.
What it takes to make glass stronger
With this latest edition of new glass, Corning decided to tackle both problems at once.
The process to develop new glass takes approximately two years and tons of testing. Bayne said the company begins with about 1,000 potential potential glass compositions, which it tests using a computer simulation before selecting a handful for more advanced testing.
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Among its testing tools is a machine that scrapes a specially cut diamond into the glass to determine the force it takes to scratch it. Also a tool that simulates the amount of force created by dropping a phone from different heights and hitting the glass against a block covered with sandpaper, which is similar to the surface of a hard parking lot.
"No one has broken more phones in the lab than Corning," Bayne said. “It is almost equivalent to crash tests for vehicles. We are simulating the most rigorous conditions that we can to improve the product in scenarios that you could see in the real world, "he explained.
Corning's new glass will begin rolling out to devices from Samsung and other equipment manufacturers later this year.
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