Improved Vertically-Aligned Nematic Mode for High Performance Displays

Abstract

This paper presents an improved vertical alignment nematic liquid crystal mode characterized by the protrusions or slits of the top substrate and additional stripe type common electrodes with polarity switching of the bottom substrate to improve multi-domain vertically aligned (MVA) and patterned vertically aligned (PVA) nematic modes. MVA and PVA modes have disadvantages such as an LC disclination in the vicinity of the middle region of electrodes between the top and bottom protrusions in MVA mode or the top and bottom slits in PVA mode. Therefore, the stripe type common electrode generating a horizontal electric field and the protrusion or slit producing some pretilt of liquid crystals (LCs) were used to improve the LC disclination, which influences the transmittance and response speed. The simulation results showed that the proposed VA mode has higher transmittance than the MVA and PVA modes. As a result, the proposed VA mode can improve the response speed and transmittance remarkably, which makes it useful for upgrading the LCD display quality.