Sturdier mobile phone displays that won’t crack or break?
All the recent buzz about sapphire display covers has a lot of consumers excited about the potential for a sturdier mobile phone display that won’t crack or break. But ramping production of enough sapphire for even one best-selling phone model is a major challenge--requiring a 7x to 10x jump in the world’s capacity for growing the sapphire material, organization of a new supply chain to make it into display covers, and some $1.8 billion in capital investment, according to technology analyst firm Yole Développement. But the major mobile phone suppliers are looking seriously at doing it.
Yole Développement’s Analyst, Eric Virey, comments: “It’s a big change for the specialty sapphire semiconductor niche to ramp to mobile phone volumes, and a big phone maker will likely have to take an active role in putting the supply chain together." But he notes that the big players are hiring sapphire experts and looking closely at potential suppliers.
High quality industrial sapphire is now mainly made by relatively small companies, who grow cylinders of the pure material and cut it into 2-inch to 4-inch diameter wafers, used to make tiny chips for LED lighting. Display panels would need to be sliced out of rectangular blocks instead, using different versions of the existing processing equipment, all optimized for an entirely different scale of production. A best-selling phone would need 2000-3000 growth furnaces to make its initial sapphire ramp up, and up to double that number ultimately, Yole Développement estimates. Current phone display panel makers already churning out 20-30 million cover units a month would likely be involved in ramping sapphire to that scale.
Cost and performance also still need some optimizing for this new application. While sapphire has near ideal properties of hardness and mechanical strength, actually producing thin display covers in high volume that maintain that quality is still a bit problematic. Slicing and polishing can introduce edge cracks and stresses than compromise the ideal, so outperforming Gorilla glass still require some work on understanding the physics and optimizing the production process. With current technology, a sapphire display cover would likely cost about $25-$30, but our models suggest that could be reduced to ~$10-$13 in volume. Adoption assumes that consumers will be willing to pay a higher price for a phone that does not break as easily, or that the phone maker that offered sturdier displays at a similar price would gain enough market share volume to come out ahead—if they can create the scalable supply chain.
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