High transmittance in-plane switching liquid crystal mode using double-exposed UV alignment method

Abstract

In general, the super in-plane switching (S-IPS) liquid crystal (LC) mode is widely used for LCD applications because of its wide-viewing properties. However, it can also diminish the aperture ratio in active areas due to the zigzag pattern. In this paper, we proposed an IPS LC mode that has wide-viewing properties even if the stripe-patterned electrodes, which can provide a high transmittance property, are applied using the double-exposed UV alignment method to the upper/lower domain of the active area. The initial alignment direction of the upper/lower domain was optimized with simple experiments and we achieved both the superior dark level in the initial mode and wide-viewing properties in the applied voltage mode. As a result, we obtained an increased aperture ratio of about 10% and a higher optical transmittance of 15% compared to the conventional S-IPS LC cell because of the high aperture ratio without any optical loss of the initial dark state and viewing angle property.

Keywords:

• in-plane switching liquid crystal
• UV alignment method
• multi-domain transmittance
• wide-viewing angle

Additional information

Funding

Funding. This research was supported by LG Display and the Basic Science Research Program through the national Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2014014998).