Wide viewing transflective liquid crystal display with a patterned electrode

Abstract

We studied various dynamic characteristics of the transflective liquid crystal display (LCD) having a single cell gap and a single liquid crystal (LC) mode simultaneously. In this configuration, intrinsic optical path difference between transmissive and reflective part was compensated by modifying LC's optic axis with different patterned electrode configurations and voltage application. The angle of electrode was designed to induce appropriate optical retardations in each part and the resultant electro-optic characteristics were matched identically. Also, we minimized the mismatches in grey level by optimizing the angle of reflective part through the simulation. Moreover, the wide viewing characteristics of transflective LCD was verified from the 8-domain LC structure of our sample while only 4-domains can be achieved in the conventional case. By using this technique, we can easily achieve transflective LCD of good performances under same optical setup such as polarizers and retardation films over the whole panel area without complicated fabrication.