Transflective liquid crystal display (LCD) is required for mobile and portable applications, because of their superior performance in both indoor and outdoor environment. Transflective LCD is developed based on the conventional transmissive and reflective LCD by combining their characteristics together. For common transflective LCD, the pixels are separated into the transmissive and reflective sub-pixels. The transmissive sub-pixels in a transflective display are transmitting with backlight illumination and the reflective sub-pixels are reflecting light from the environment under ambient illumination. Commercialized conventional transflective LCDs are mostly fabricated by double cell gap approach, which show good performance and well matched optical performance of both transmissive and...[ Read more ]

Transflective liquid crystal display (LCD) is required for mobile and portable applications, because of their superior performance in both indoor and outdoor environment. Transflective LCD is developed based on the conventional transmissive and reflective LCD by combining their characteristics together. For common transflective LCD, the pixels are separated into the transmissive and reflective sub-pixels. The transmissive sub-pixels in a transflective display are transmitting with backlight illumination and the reflective sub-pixels are reflecting light from the environment under ambient illumination. Commercialized conventional transflective LCDs are mostly fabricated by double cell gap approach, which show good performance and well matched optical performance of both transmissive and reflective parts. However; on the other hand, the fabrication process is very complicated, which makes the products expensive. For mobile and portable applications, cheap transflective LCDs are in great need. So people put effort on single cell gap approach to make the display with good performance and matched Transmittance versus Voltage Curve (TVC) and Reflectance versus Voltage Curve (RVC).

In this thesis, several new configurations of transflective LCD with single cell gap approach are proposed. Two general types of transflective LCD are proposed. Firstly, the dual mode single cell gap transflective configurations. Secondly, the single mode single cell gap transflective configurations with patterned retardation films. Photoalignment technology has been studied and is used in the fabrication of the single cell gap transflective LCD configurations. By photoalignment technology, we can easily produce different alignment domains on the same alignment layer; also, we can produce patterned retardation films with domain alignment.