Corning's Gorilla Glass was instrumental in helping to change the landscape of mobile devices just as smartphones really started to take off. The company planned to follow up that success with Lotus Glass in 2011 but the technology never really became a commercial success partially due to the fact that it was difficult to produce reliably at high temperatures.

That's all been rectified according to Corning with the commercial launch of Corning Lotus XT Glass, a second generation glass substrate designed specifically for high performance displays. One of the key elements of the new material is best-in-class total pitch variation, or the distance features move during panel processing.

If you can predict the amount that glass shifts then you can account for this movement, according John P. Bayne, vice president and general manager for Corning High Performance Displays. Deviation from this predictable movement can result in yield loss but with Lotus XT Glass having improved thermal and dimensional stability over higher temperatures, it will generate higher yields for customers.

It's said to work with organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays and liquid crystal displays (LCD) that use either low-temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) or oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) backplanes. The result, Corning claims, is an energy efficient, immersive display device that features high resolution, fast response times and bright picture quality.

The new technology is commercially available as of writing but of course it will be some time before manufacturers implement it in new devices. Until then, interested parties can get a closer look at Lotus XT Glass during the Society for Information Display's Display Week in Vancouver starting May 21.