We propose a transflective liquid crystal (LC) display that can be operated in a single driving scheme as shown in Fig. 1 (a). In such transflective LC cell, the LC molecules are homogenously aligned in both the transmissive and reflective regions. In order to compensate the optical path difference between the transmissive and reflective regions, a periodic inner-patterned retarder is prepared in the transflective LC cell. This inner-patterned retarder has several advantages such as the compactness and no parallax over an external optical film. Moreover, the inner-patterned retarder can be fabricated using a photo-polymerizable liquid crystalline material through a simple self-masking process. The photoalignment polymer of LGC-M0 (LG Cables) was used for aligning the photo-polymerizable liquid crystalline material of LC-298 (BASF) in two different directions, the angles of 0° and 45° between the direction of the retarder and the rear polarizer in the transmissive and reflective parts as shown in Fig. 1 (b). and (c). It was found that the voltage-dependent transmittance and reflectance curves are very similar to each other, and thus a single driving scheme can be employed.

This work was supported in part by Samsung Electronics AMLCD, Korea.