24
Liquid Crystal Television
A computer monitor or notebook computer is usually viewed by one person at a time. so their wide-viewing angle quality perhaps is not that important, but for a living room television set, wide-viewing angle quality is an objective that must be attained and a technical problem that must be overcome.
The compensation films developed for the twisted nematic (TN) liquid crystal displays described in Chapter 23, albeit improving the wide-view quality, also brought process complexity, loss of transmittance, and undesirable gains in weight and thickness. The addition of more and more increasingly complicated compensation schemes led the Japanese companies Fujitsu and Hitachi to instead attack the problem at its base; that is, at the fundamental liquid crystal molecular orientation level. And so Fujitsu developed the multiple-domain vertical alignment (MVA), and Hitachi the in-plane switching (IPS) display modes to directly address the wide-viewing angle problem.
Vertical Alignment
A transparent silane coupling agent, or a deposition of a silicon polyoxide layer (SiOx), applied as an anchoring agent on the ITOs and glass substrates can cause the molecules near the glass to attach their feet to the anchoring agent and stand up, as shown schematically in Figure 24.1. Because of the charge polarization structure of the anchoring molecules, they can effectively attract the oppositely charged polarization extremity of the liquid crystal molecules near the glass ...
