• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.07a
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• pp.774-777
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• 2005

In this work, a soft embossing method is proposed to fabricate microgrooves on polyimide surfaces. Apply these resulting patterned micro-grooved polyimide surfaces as the liquid crystal alignment layers. The director of liquid crystal molecules aligns perfectly along the direction of microgrooves.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.58-65
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• 2022

The field of liquid crystal display (LCD) is constantly in the spotlight and the process of depositing an alignment layer in the LCD manufacturing process is very important to obtain excellent performance such as low-power driving and high-speed response to improve LCD performance. Therefore, research on liquid crystal (LC) alignment is being actively conducted. When manufacturing LCD, it is necessary to consider the effect of the alignment layer thickness as one of the factors affecting various LCD performances. In addition, previous studies confirmed the LC alignment characteristics correlate with the rotation speed in the spin coating process. Therefore, the electro-optical properties of the LCD were investigated by manufacturing a polyimide alignment layer by varying the rotation speed in the spin coating process in this study. It was confirmed that the thickness of the polyimide alignment layer was controlled according to the spin coating conditions. The average transmittances of anti-parallel LC cells at the spin coating speed of 2,500 rpm and 3,000 rpm are about 60%, which indicates that the LC cell has relatively higher performance. At the spin coating speed of 3,000 rpm, the voltage-transmittance curve of twisted nematic (TN) LC cell was below 1.5 V, which means that the TN LC cell operated at a low power. In addition, high-speed operating characteristics were confirmed with a response time of less than 30 ms. From these derived data, we confirmed that the ideal spin coating speed is 3,000 rpm. And these results provide an optimized polyimide alignment layer process when considering enhanced future LCD manufacturing.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.08a
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• pp.818-821
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• 2006

We demonstrate the vertical alignment of liquid crystal on $a-SiO_x$ film surface using the ion beam exposure. Liquid crystal can be aligned vertically by the rotational oblique evaporation of $a-SiO_x$ film. However, the electro-optic switching behavior of liquid crystal along random directions results in disclination lines. We found that we can achieve highly uniform alignment of liquid crystal without disclination lines by using the ion beam exposure. We found from XRD and XPS data that the vertical alignment can be achieved when x approaches 1.5 at the $a-SiO_x$ film surface. We have shown that the pretilt angle can be controlled by changing ion beam parameters, such as the ion beam energy, the angle of incidence, and the exposure time. We found that whether liquid crystals can be aligned vertically or homogeneously on $a-SiO_x$ film can be predicted simply by measuring the change in optical transmittance by deposition of $a-SiO_x$ thin film layers. We also have shown that a liquid crystal cell aligned vertically by the ion beam exposure exhibits the voltage-transmittance curve similar to that of a rubbed polyimide cell.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.72-77
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• 2019

The display that provides information to us through the visual sense is a very important information transmission means by intuitively transmitting information, and the liquid crystal display (LCD) is the most widely used information transmission display. In this paper, we studied solvent assisted micromolding as an alternative for the rubbing that is essential to align the liquid crystals in LCD and successfully aligned the liquid crystal molecules by constructing the nanostructures on conventional polyimide alignment layer. When generating the nanostructures on the polyimide film, there was a competitive correlation between the dissolution effect of the polymer by the solvent and the capillary effect of the polyimide molecules into the nanostructures of the mold depending on the process temperature. It was possible to form nanostructures with high step by deriving the optimum temperature. These nanostructures were able to align the liquid crystal molecules uniformly and demonstrated that they could form a desirable pretilt angle.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.18 no.10
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• pp.521-528
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• 2008

We present the structural, optical, and electrical properties of amorphous silicon suboxide (a-$SiO_x$) films grown on indium tin oxide glass substrates with a radio frequency magnetron technique from a polycrystalline silicon oxide target using ambient Ar. For different substrate-target distances (d = 8 cm and 10 cm), the deposition temperature effects were systematically studied. For d = 8cm, oxygen content in a-$SiO_x$ decreased with dissociation of oxygen onto the silicon oxide matrix; temperature increased due to enlargement of kinetic energy. For d = 10 cm, however, the oxygen content had a minimum between $150^{\circ}\;and\;200^{\circ}$. Using simple optical measurements, we can predict a preferred orientation of liquid crystal molecules on a-$SiO_x$ thin film. At higher oxygen content (x > 1.6), liquid crystal molecules on an inorganic liquid crystal alignment layer of a-$SiO_x$ showed homogeneous alignment; however, in the lower case (x < 1.6), liquid crystals showed homeotropic alignment.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.208-208
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• 2009

We used Brewster's Law to examine the mechanism of liquid crystal (LC) alignment on an organic insulation layer when subjected to ion-beam irradiation. Brewster's Law implies that the maximum rate polarized ray on a slanted insulation layers on the substrate and it illustrates the dependence of polarization and themechanical structure on the ion beam irradiation process. The pretilt angle of nematic LCs on the organic insulation surface was about $1.13^{\circ}$ for an ion beam exposure of $45^{\circ}$ for 1 minute at 1800eV. This shows the dependence of LC alignment on the polarization ratio in a slanted organic insulation layer.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.355-358
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• 2016

We present the alignment characteristics of LC (liquid crystal) molecules on solution-derived HLO (hafnium lanthanum oxide) films fabricated using IB (ion-beam) irradiation. We then demonstrated that LC molecules can be homogeneously and uniformly aligned on the HLO film irradiated at an IB incident energy of 1.2 keV. Physicochemical analysis methods such as atomic force microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy were used to verify the LC alignment mechanism on the IB-irradiated HLO film. In addition, the electro-optical performance of a TN (twisted-nematic) cell fabricated using the IB-irradiated HLO film exhibited characteristics superior to those of the conventional TN cell fabricated using a rubbed polyimide layer.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.21-24
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• 2020

We investigated a solution-driven Yttrium Tin Oxide (YSnO) film that was imprinted using a parallel nanostructure as a liquid crystal (LC) alignment layer. The imprinting process was conducted at the annealing temperature of 100℃. To evaluate the effect of this process, we conducted surface analyses including atomic force microscopy (AFM). During imprinting, the surface roughness was reduced, and anisotropic characteristics were observed. Planar LC alignment was observed at a pretilt angle of 0.22° on YSnO film. Surface anisotropy induced by imprinting method forces LC to align along the direction of the parallel nanostructure, which is an alternative to conventional polyimide treated using a rubbing process.

• Electrical & Electronic Materials
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.461-466
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• 1997

In this paper, we developed the new non-rubbing liquid crystal (LC) alignment techniques in the cell with slanted non-polarized ultraviolet (UV) light irradiation on polyimide (PI) film. It is shown that the uniform alignment for nematic (N) LC is obtained by using slanted non-polarized UV light irradiation on PI surface. We successfully obtained that the pretilt angle of NLC is generated about 3.3 degree in the cell with slanted non-polarized UV light irradiation with 70 degree on PI surface, for the first time. It is considered that the pretilt angle generation in NLC is attributed to interaction between the LC molecular and the PI, which is broken the polymer by slanted non-polarized UV irradiation. Therefore, we concluded that the uniform LC alignment is attributed to anisotropic dispersion force due to photo depolymerization with slanted non-polarized UV light irradiation on PI surface.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.264-268
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• 2002

Three types of polymer, a photoalignment material based N- (phenol)maleimide were synthesized and the liquid crystal (LC) aligning capabilities on the photopolymer layer were studied. A good LC alignment with UV exposure on the PMI5CA(N-(phenol)maleimide with 5-carbon chain cinnamoyl group) can be obtained. However, the LC alignment defects were observed on the PM13CA (N-(phenol)maleimide with 3-carbon chain cinnamoyl group) and PMIF (N-(phenyl)maleimide including fluoro cinnamoyl group). Also, the good LC alignment with UV exposure on the PM15CA surface was observed at until $150^{\circ}C$ of annealing temperature. The LC aligning ability on the photopolymer layer based N-(phenol)maleimide depends on the side chain length of photopolymer.