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After eight years, Macro Polo has ceased operations as the Paulson Institute will focus its independent research on supporting its programs as it continues to diversify its scope.

We appreciate the community that has grown around Macro Polo and the fruitful engagement we’ve had with our legion of smart and sharp audience. You’ve pushed us to deliver even more original work and innovative products. Our body of work speaks for itself, and we hope it will have a long shelf life – that was the intent from MP’s inception.

MP’s website is now archived and no new work will be published henceforth on this site. Please visit www.paulsoninstitute.org for future research and policy work on a range of global issues.

Thank you all for the support over the years, it has been a privilege to have had a home at the Paulson Institute and to have built it the way we did.

- Team Macro Polo

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Forging Glass

Closeup on Corning Glass

Based in upstate New York, Corning is a significant US player in the OLED display supply chain. It manufactures various types of durable, scratch-resistant, and specialty glass for both the cover and substrates that are integral to OLED displays. Corning has a storied history, having made the glass casing for the original Thomas Edison light bulb. More recently, Corning has invested heavily in R&D and is a leader in cutting-edge glass technology.

Corning’s most popular product is Gorilla Glass, which was developed specifically after Steve Jobs inquired about making a suitable cover glass for the original iPhone. Today, Gorilla Glass can be found on some 6 billion devices, from smartphones and tablets to wearables. Although Apple now wants to pursue microLED display technology, Corning still supplies to OEMs and name brands around the world, including Chinese phone makers Huawei, ZTE, and Xiaomi.

Let’s take a closer look at Gorilla Glass.

Silicon

Gorilla Glass is a type of aluminosilicate glass that’s strengthened through a proprietary chemical process. But its main ingredient, like virtually all glass, is high-purity silica sand (typically >99.5% purity), which is basically silicon. The silica is mixed with some combination of aluminum, sodium, and magnesium.

Sand

It is difficult to know the specific suppliers of raw materials to Corning, but it is likely the company gets its silica from one of these leading industry players:

Sibelco, The Quartz Corporation, Nordic Mining ASA, Creswick Quartz Plt Ltd., Mineracao Santa Rosa, HPQ Materials, Lianyungang Donghai Colorful Mineral Products Co., Ltd., Momentive, Jiangsu Pacific Quartz Co., Ltd., and Kyshtym Mining.

A few of the companies operate in North Carolina, which boasts some of the highest purity silica in the world. As for the aluminum, sodium, and magnesium, these are abundant elements that are found and produced around the world.

Glass

Raw materials are shipped to Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where most Gorilla Glass is still made in a plant that was established in 1952 (Gorilla Glass is now also made in Corning’s Asia operations). Materials are mixed and melted in a high-tech oven in what Corning calls a “fusion draw process”: The glass forms and hardens below a trough without ever being touched by a human hand.

But, to achieve Gorilla-level strength, that fused glass then undergoes an ion exchange process, whereby it is soaked in a sodium salt bath. The extremely high temperatures of the bath allow sodium ions to escape and to be replaced by larger potassium ions. After cooling, these potassium ions are compressed much closer, creating additional rigidity in the glass.