Etching Effects of Blended Polyimide Layers for Liquid Crystals

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel alignment method for control of pretilt angles in liquid crystals (LCs) using an etchant dipping effect on a mixed polyimide layer as an alternative alignment layer for liquid crystal display applications. A rubbing process was used to induce LC alignment and induce the measured LC pretilt angle on the etchant dipped mixture layer. The resulting thermal stabilities were good, however thermal stresses decreased as the etchant dipping time increased, indicating that the LC anchoring energy became weaker as a function of etchant dipping time after treatment. Excellent voltage-transmittance characteristics for vertically aligned cells were observed for all conditions.

Keywords:

• alignment method
• etchant dipping effect
• mixed polyimide
• rubbing process

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) Support program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency) (NIPA-2009-C1090-0902-0018).