Photo Spacer Induced Bistable Mode Plastic PSFLCDs for High Mechanical Stability

We report new polymer stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal (PSFLC) cells with mechanical stability which is achievable by introducing photospacers in the cells. It was found that the mechanical st ability of the PSFLC cell was effected by introduction of photo spacers. We analyzed the dependence of mechanical stability and memory property on the density of photospacers in the PSFLC cell. The stability and memory properties of PSFLC Cells depending on photospacer density are discussed. 1. Introduction Recently, flexible displays have attracted much attention because they have remarkable advantages: thinner, lighter, non-breakable and conformable features. Flexible displays have various potential applications such as e-book and e-paper displays utilizing the distinct features. E-book and E-paper displays demand very low power consumption, so that bistable memory liquid crystal modes are required in case of flexible plastic LCDs for those application. Three kinds of memory LC modes have been developed; bistable nematic, bistable cholesteric and bistable FLC. Among them SSFLC as one of bistable FLC has big advantages such as low driving voltage, wide view angle and fast response time, SSFLC cells are, however, very weak against mechanical shock. Polymer stabilized FLC (PSFLC) has been developed to overcome the poor mechanical stability of SSFLC. PSFLC was known to have network structure that FLCs are oriented with smectic layer ordering in polymer network. The polymer network stabilizes the FLC orientation, which leads to improvement of mechanical stability of PSFLCD. A lot of studies have been done for the application of PSFLC to flexible $LCDs.^{[1{\sim}12]}$ However, it should be noted that PSFLC does not have sufficient mechanical stability for the particular applications such as smart card LCD, where LCD is highly bendable.Bead spacer was mainly used to maintain cell gap of conventional PSFLCDs. But the spacer density of it is not locally uniform in the cell, so that it is generally difficult that the PSFLCDs with bead spacers show sufficient mechanical stability. In order to more improve the mechanical stability of PSFLCDs, we introduced photospacers into PSFLCDs. In this paper, we describe the improvement of mechanical stability by introducing photospacers into PSFLCDs.