Four‐domain twisted nematic liquid crystal display fabricated by reverse rubbed polyimide process

In Appl. Phys. Lett. 67, 1990 (1995), we proposed a particularly simple four‐domain (4‐D) twisted nematic(TN) liquid crystal display(LCD) device, which is composed of two left‐handed and two right‐handed TN subpixels. The two members of each pair of same handedness subpixels are rotated 180° with respect to each other, resulting in four domains that spatially average one another optically to provide a wide angle of viewing with no gray scale inversion. The optical performance of the 4‐D TN LCD was confirmed by studies of a test cell fabricated by a two‐step SiOx oblique evaporation technique. In this article, we report the realization of our four‐domain TN display by a reverse rubbing technique that should be suitable for mass production in the display industry. The optical simulation of our 4‐D TN cell was performed and the effect of disclinations at subpixel boundaries on display contrast investigated. A simple model was developed to evaluate the stability of our 4‐D structure.