Apple recently signed a deal with GT Advanced to open and operate a sapphire production facility in Mesa, Arizona. The plant is expected to boost the bottom lineof materials supplier GT Advanced and will supply Apple with an unknown amount of sapphire for use in its upcoming devices. Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch takes a close look at sapphire and explains why the material may be important to Apple.
TechCrunch talked to Matthew Hall, Director of the Center for Advanced Ceramic Technology at the Kazuo Inamori School of Engineering at Alfred University about the properties of sapphire that make it attractive to device manufacturers. Because of how it is made, synthetic sapphire is optically transparent like glass and extremely hard. Its hardness and toughness make it scratch resistant as well as crack resistant. It might be heavier than competitors like Corning’s Gorilla Glass, but Apple could offset this weight by using thinner pieces of sapphire in the displays for its mobile devices and possibly the rumored iWatch.
Unfortunately, Sapphire is harder and more expensive to make than Gorilla Glass, which is where GT Advanced comes in. The company’s experience in materials manufacturing, especially with sapphire production, could be used to come up with new ways to manufacture the material in a high volume, cost-effective way.
If you want to read more about the properties of sapphire and the challenges of manufacturing it, then head over to TechCrunch. It’s an excellent primer on how materials science intersects with consumer technology
No comments:
Post a Comment