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November 12, 2013 05:41 am GMT

Apple, The Hyperion Ion Cannon And Why Future iPhones Could Have A Sapphire Screen

hyperion-particle-accelerator1-640x353Late last week we published a piece about why Apple would want to build a factory to manufacture sapphire crystal, and why it might want to own over $570M worth of that production up front. Today, by connecting a few more dots, we can piece together how it could overcome the pricing and production volume barriers in order to use the material in smartphone screens. Lets start back in March of 2012, when a company called Twin Creeks came out of relative stealth to talk about a new production system it had created to manufacture photovoltaic (solar) cells that were cheaper and thinner, called Hyperion 3. The manufacturing process for most solar panels involves manufacturing a block of sapphire or other crystalline silicon and then slicing a .2mm-thick sheet off of it with a wafering saw. Twin Creeks hydrogen ion particle accelerator (basically an ion cannon) allowed them to place wafers around the edges of the device and smash them with hydrogen ions. Heres a description of the process from Extreme Tech: A particle accelerator bombards these wafers with hydrogen ions, and with exacting control of the voltage of the accelerator, the hydrogen ions accumulate precisely 20 micrometers from the surface of each wafer. A robotic arm then transports the wafers to a furnace where the ions expand into hydrogen gas, which cause the 20-micrometer-thick layer to shear off. The process, when applied to solar, is then followed up by backing the sheets with flexible metal. The result is a huge reduction in thickness of sheets without the use of saws. This results in a big reduction in costs. Why do we care about a cool, but esoteric manufacturing process for solar panels? Well, jumping back to our piece from last week, you may recall that Apple is going in on a manufacturing deal with a company called GT Advanced Technologies. The deal will see Apple building a factory in which GT Advanced will make sapphire glass in high volumes. The only problem with the high-volume production of sapphire for smartphone screens is that most analysts will tell you that its simply not cost-effective. A report in the MIT Technology Review early last year quotes analyst Eric Virey of research firm Yole Dveloppement as saying that a sapphire display could cost around $30 or fall to around $20 in a couple of years. Gorilla Glass, by comparison, runs less than

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/0wdpU_QMIew/

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