Live data from Hacker News

Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

bloomberg.com

51–60 of 72 posts

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#51

This descriptions does not sound like it's about something that is "virtually unbreakable" : "The sample looked like an ordinary piece of glass, 4 inches square and transparent on both sides. It’d been packed like the precious specimen its inventor, Adam Khan, believed it to be—placed on wax paper, nestled in a tray lined with silicon gel, enclosed in a plastic case, surrounded by air bags, sealed in a cardboard box—…

It may very well be "virtually unbreakable" for the use case of something that's supposed to survive the rigors of life as a display for consumer electronics device. Breaking it, of course, would be something that any device designer would do in the course of characterizing or evaluating it as a component for a new product. Whether that would have been done on the first sample is something that's strictly between the…

Breaking the test material is essential. That's what determines the engineering limits of any applications, and also the failure modes for exceeded tolerances.

It's all fine and good if your device can survive a drop from 1m onto a hard floor without cracking or chipping, but if a fall from 2m then results in a cloud of razor-sharp glass flechettes, that shred all flesh in a 5m radius, you're probably not going to want that particular screen treatment in a consumer product.

But this test material was not supposed to be used for that, I guess. I'm not sure how they were supposed to evaluate it.

Personally, I'd want to do all of the following:

  Put it in a rock tumbler with a bunch of keys and coins.
  Scratch it with a steel razor blade.
  Drive a galvanized deck nail through it with a claw hammer.
  Drill a hole through it with a SiC drill bit.
  Heat it up with a propane torch.
  Put it in a freezer.
  Drop it from 2m onto a hard floor.
  Bend it in multiple directions.
  Pinch it until it cracks.
  Try to find a resonance frequency with ultrasound.
Most of those are potentially destructive.

Perhaps this one was more for optical properties? Refractive index, absorption spectra?

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#52
I'll be slightly pedantic: the coating is almost certainly diamond-like carbon (DLC), not diamond.

DLC is a complicated class of materials, generally composed of amorphous carbon (no long-range order - kind of like glass) with the same kind of interatomic bonds you see in diamond (sp3 bonds). It's often applied by sputtering or ion beam deposition.

Diamond is sp3-bonded carbon with long-range crystalline order. It's most often made by chemical vapor deposition, which is slow and expensive compared to DLC deposition methods.

The DLC coating described in the article won't do much to reduce glass breakage. But it will greatly increase scratch resistance because it's nearly as hard as diamond.

Diamond doesn't melt unless you're heating it while it's also under enormous pressure to keep it from turning to graphite. It does ablate, or vaporize when hit with laser pulses. This is used to remove small graphite inclusions in diamond.

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#53
post #45

As a side-side note, I do understand how journalists may want a career as writers and US articles tend to have pointless details/descriptions, but this is IMHO way too much: >Khan was casually dressed in a dark peacoat, black button-up shirt, gray pants, and sneakers. Shurboff’s attire was more businesslike: a light blue dress shirt, gray sports jacket, black trousers, and brand-new leather shoes.

Thank you for saying this -- this kind of fluff filler annoys me too.

It always makes me think me of a kid padding an essay to reach the teacher's limit though I'm pretty sure that's not actually the case.

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#54
post #53
post #45

As a side-side note, I do understand how journalists may want a career as writers and US articles tend to have pointless details/descriptions, but this is IMHO way too much: >Khan was casually dressed in a dark peacoat, black button-up shirt, gray pants, and sneakers. Shurboff’s attire was more businesslike: a light blue dress shirt, gray sports jacket, black trousers, and brand-new leather shoes.

Thank you for saying this -- this kind of fluff filler annoys me too. It always makes me think me of a kid padding an essay to reach the teacher's limit though I'm pretty sure that's not actually the case.

It's trying to add some "human interest" to the story. It annoys those of us who want "just the facts". But for others, it makes the story come alive.

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#55

Is there anything that Huawei does that Western companies don't do, such as trying to steal their competitors secrets? https://www.digitaltrends.com/business/google-sues-uber-over... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43010348 For any older person this is no news. Didn't we something like this with Hitachi in the 80s? Of course the authorities try to ban purchases from foreign companies that steal American company…

Why would Huawei trying to steal some glass technology while it is not in the business sector at all? Logically it had nothing to gain there.

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#56

I'll be slightly pedantic: the coating is almost certainly diamond-like carbon (DLC), not diamond. DLC is a complicated class of materials, generally composed of amorphous carbon (no long-range order - kind of like glass) with the same kind of interatomic bonds you see in diamond (sp3 bonds). It's often applied by sputtering or ion beam deposition. Diamond is sp3-bonded carbon with long-range crystalline order. It's…

Off topic: over the next couple of years I'm looking to develop a small-scale ion-beam coating system for applying DLC as part of a single-piece-flow process cell. I currently send out my products for DLC coating, and the coater does a good job but they keep making process changes (which affects color) without warning me, so I want to bring it in-house to avoid that and to eliminate the need to batch components for them.

I would release the design as open source after it's completed. Sounds like you have some knowledge in this area so let me know if you'd be interested in collaborating!

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#57

"They recall the gemologist saying he’d analyzed the diamond glass sample and concluded that Huawei had blasted it with a 100-kilowatt laser, powerful enough to be used as a weapon." What? how can you determine that from a piece of broke glass?

It's a bit of a tangent, but there's an entire field of study called "fractography" which is all about doing things exactly like that. Further tangent: "a piece of broke glass" can exhibit interesting morphology... "mirror", "mist", and "hackle" are distinctive signatures of different fracture conditions.

Fascinating! Did not know about that subject until now. For anyone that studies material engineering even casually, it's an important sub-topic (I never took material engineering in college, that's why I was ignorant about this subject prior to your comment). On a related note, I found this cool related link on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fracture_mechanics. Anyway, thanks again for the comment!

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may very well be "virtually unbreakable" for the use case of something that's supposed to survive the rigors of life as a display for consumer electronics device. Breaking it, of course, would be something that any device designer would do in the course of characterizing or evaluating it as a component for a new product. Whether that would have been done on the first sample is something that's strictly between the…

Breaking the test material is essential. That's what determines the engineering limits of any applications, and also the failure modes for exceeded tolerances. It's all fine and good if your device can survive a drop from 1m onto a hard floor without cracking or chipping, but if a fall from 2m then results in a cloud of razor-sharp glass flechettes, that shred all flesh in a 5m radius, you're probably not going to wa…

I wonder if someone were to test all breakable and non-breakable materials with ultrasound to try to find their resonance frequency (as you suggested, but with all materials), if they'd discover that there's some relationship between sound frequency and the "breakableness" or the "non-breakableness" of the material in question... intuition says that there's something there...

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#59
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice astro-turfing for the Chinese government. All these 'Account created 2 hours ago' people chiming in.

They also slam the [-] like a swarm of angry bees. At least they are obvious to see.

It is interesting that HN has caught the attention of the 50 cent army.

Re: Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also according to the agreement Huawei was not supposed to "break" it. I am not sure how they are supposed to evaluate it without scratching at it.

This one stood out to me too. What benefit it even is to get a sample of protective glass if you are not allowed to test it? ”Here. Look at it. Trust us that it’s super resistant to scratches”.

There are plenty of "unbreakable" coatings. It sounds like what makes this unique is that is was suitable as a display cover.

An initial evaluation would be measuring things like how much light energy of what frequencies is able to penetrate the coating. Is the viewing angle acceptable for a consumer device, etc.

Hitting it with a hammer can always come later when they determine that it is a good display glass first.

Post reply on HN