Samsung Files Patent for a Glass Layer Designed to Reduce Visible Folding Lines on Flexible Screens
Samsung's idea for a less visible crease starts before the screen ever folds: shape the cover glass in advance, right where the hinge will be.
What Samsung's pre-bent foldable glass does
A foldable phone lies open on a kitchen counter, and a faint line runs down the middle of the screen. That line is the crease, and every time the phone closes, the screen pushes back a little against the hinge.
Samsung's patent application goes after both problems through the cover glass on top of the display. Instead of keeping that glass perfectly flat and forcing it to bend later, the strip over the hinge is shaped with a gentle dip ahead of time, so it has less distance to travel when you fold.
Soft, clear layers on the front and back fill in the dip, so the surface you touch still ends up flat. In the company's own computer simulations, the force pushing back dropped by about 47% compared with a similar cover that has no dip.
… a flexible cover structure ( 400 ) disposed on the flexible display panel, the flexible cover structure comprising: a glass layer ( 410 ) including a first area (S 1 ) and a second area (S 2 ) extending from the first area and corresponding to a bending or rolling area of the flexible display panel …
Translation: The screen cover includes a special glass layer with flat and folding sections to handle the bend.
How the dented glass and two coatings stack up
The cover sits on top of a flexible display panel that spans two housings. Its glass layer has a flat first area over each housing and a second area over the part that folds or rolls. That second area is pre-formed into a shallow curve bending toward the rear coating, so the front face dips slightly and the back face bulges slightly.
Two clear polymer coatings wrap the glass. The front coating fills the dip so the top surface stays level, which makes it thickest right at the fold. The rear coating is far softer. The filing gives a modulus (a measure of stiffness) of about 600 MPa for the front and about 10 MPa for the back. Added up, the layers are the same total thickness over the fold as everywhere else.
The description also lists several variations:
- Tiny holes or slits cut through the glass over the fold and filled with soft material, giving the glass room to stretch as it bends
- Glass that gets thinner toward the center of the fold
- A removable protective film, about 5 to 10 micrometers thick, on top
- Front coating only in the fold zone, leaving bare glass elsewhere
The bent strip is narrower than the hinge, and the glass is roughly 30 to 200 micrometers thick depending on the version. The filing also covers rollable, outward-folding, sliding and multi-fold devices.
Why a softer crease matters on foldable screens
If this works the way the filing describes, a foldable would take less effort to close and show a less obvious crease. In the company's simulations, folding to a radius of about 1.5 mm produced roughly half the pushback force of a comparison cover (about 47% less), and the peak stress in the front coating fell by about 39%.
The design also moves where the stress builds up, away from the center of the fold and toward the edges of the bent strip. That shift is how the filing argues the crease gets shallower. It fits foldable phones like the ones Samsung already sells, though the filing names no product. Keep in mind that every result here comes from computer models, not a finished device.
Samsung's 85th filing we've tracked since May joins earlier work like one fixing camera blocks and one that adapts to your task in our foldable phone patents watch.
If you own a foldable, the crease is the thing you notice every time the screen lights up. A cover glass shaped to fold before you ever fold it aims at that exact spot, and the filing's own simulations show a big drop in the force needed to bend it.
You would feel the difference in how the hinge moves and see it as a fainter line across the middle. The catch is that the filing offers only computer models, with no real-world durability tests. Glass this thin has to survive keys, coins and thousands of folds, and a simulation can't promise that.
One version stands out for everyday use: the front glass is left bare outside the fold, so your fingertip meets glass directly. That makes this a modest-sounding hardware tweak that speaks to complaints foldable owners have today.
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The drawings
46 drawing sheets from US 2026/0323852 A1 · click any drawing to enlarge
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