Viewing angle controllable liquid crystal display under optical compensation

We investigated a viewing angle control of a liquid crystal display (LCD) under optical compensation for the enhancement of viewing angle characteristics in a wide viewing angle mode. The viewing angle controllable (VAC) LCD was operated in the configuration of three terminal electrodes consisting of a fringe-field-switching electrode at a bottom substrate and a common electrode at a top substrate. Using Poincare sphere analysis, the optical compensation for the VAC LCD was designed so that the viewing angle characteristics were much improved in the wide viewing mode while they were degraded in the narrow viewing mode. (C) 2011 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). [DOI: 10.1117/1.3622761]This work was supported by a grant (F0004121-2010-32) from Information Display R&D Center, one of the Knowledge Economy Frontier R&D Programs funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy of the Korean Government, and by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd