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

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.