This is a follow-up to Matt’s piece on Apple’s investment in synthetic sapphire.
TechCrunch talks about how Apple might have found a way to mass produce sapphire displays cheaper.
This brings us to a few months ago, when Apple filed a patent called ‘sapphire laminates’, in which it discusses a variety of ways to laminate sapphire sheets together with other sapphire sheets or with glass. There are a variety of abstractions, but the key is a method which mates two separate sheets together to create one ‘piece’. The key claim we’re looking at here is “a glass assembly comprising: a glass sheet; and a sapphire sheet adhered to the glass sheet, wherein the assembly is less than or approximately equal to 1 mm thick.”
This claim outlines a process where a glass sheet could be produced and mated with a sapphire sheet to create a screen (another claim describes a ‘sandwich process’ as well, with two sapphire sheets). Why a screen with glass underneath and sapphire on top?
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