Operation of liquid crystal (LC) devices requires uniform orientation and reproducible pretilt angle of the LC director on aligning surfaces. Recently, it has been strongly required to develop non-contact LC aligning method instead of traditional rubbing method as the mother glass size of TFT-LCD production line became very large. Photoalignment technology, as one of the non-contact methods, has been the subject of extensive research since the principle was reported. The photoalignment method, which has many advantages as compared to rubbing method, however is not yet applied to TFT-LCD manufacturing line mainly due to image sticking problem. We report on the image sticking properties of IPS-LCDs fabricated using new photoaligning polymers based on cellulose main chain and side fragments based on cinnamic acid containing alkenyl group. In our results, the photopolymer-used IPS-LCD shows very low image sticking comparable to rubbed PI one.

* The work was supported by 21st Century Frontier R&D Program, “Next Generation Display Technology Development” funded by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy of Korea.