Apple has unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable smartphone, bringing one of consumer electronics’ toughest manufacturing challenges into focus: how to build a phone that can fold hundreds of thousands of times without cracking. According to experts at femtosecond laser company LITILIT, the same pressure is now felt across electronics manufacturing, as devices become smaller, thinner, and more complex.
The iPhone’s hinge mechanism is built from more than 100 components. Inside, support ribs add stiffness, while antenna splits with ceramic fibre inserts strengthen the frame, according to Apple’s press release. Unlike Samsung, which has publicised 500,000-fold durability testing for its latest foldable displays, Apple didn’t specify how many folds its hinge can withstand.
But the hinge is only part of the challenge: foldable phones bring together several difficult materials and components that all need to hold up to repeated folding, from ultra-thin glass and flexible display layers to compact printed circuit boards, ceramics, and semiconductor parts. Nikolajus Gavrilinas, CEO and Co-Founder of LITILIT, says many components used in foldable phones and other consumer electronics need to be manufactured with extreme precision.
“The market for electronic components keeps pushing manufacturing closer to its limits. In consumer electronics, even a tiny defect can turn into a crack that makes the whole component unusable,” Gavrilinas says. “Femtosecond lasers solve these problems by using pulses so short that material evaporates before heat can spread, allowing them to process delicate components close to active circuitry without leaving heat damage or debris that could cause short circuits.”
According to Gavrilinas, femtosecond laser pulses are also well-suited for manufacturing OLED displays, used from foldable screens to smartwatches. An OLED panel is a stack of different materials such as organic light-emitting layers, circuitry, and protective layers, and even a few microns of heat damage can damage any of them. Femtosecond lasers are one of the key tools that make manufacturing OLED displays precise and reliable.
Meanwhile, manufacturing these advanced lasers is difficult and often takes time, as femtosecond lasers rely heavily on highly skilled specialists, Gavrilinas says. In addition, the growing demand for advanced lasers in consumer electronics, as well as other fast-moving fields such as semiconductors and data centre equipment manufacturing, means supply may struggle to keep up with demand.
“To solve the scalability issue, we built them from the ground up with that in mind. Our lasers have reduced component complexity, modular design, and high-level automation, which allows faster manufacturing and easier integration into factories producing parts for consumer electronics,” Gavrilinas explains.
LITILIT builds lasers based on several patented inventions developed by LITILIT co-founders Kęstutis Regelskis, Nerijus Rusteika and Gavrilinas, in close collaboration with the Centre for Physical Sciences and Technology (FTMC) in Vilnius. According to Gavrilinas, the company’s laser architecture achieves around 20% electrical-to-optical femtosecond efficiency, which is a strong result for this industry.
This June, LITILIT started building a high-capacity femtosecond laser factory that will begin production in a few months. During the first year of production, LITILIT plans to manufacture around 1,000 lasers and, in a few years, reach an annual capacity of 3,000 femtosecond lasers, on track to become the largest femtosecond laser manufacturer globally. The company is planning to expand laser production to other countries together with international partners.
