Analogue-driven bistable ferroelectric liquid crystals

This paper presents a new driving method allowing fast analogue light modulation with bistable ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLC). The method is evaluated using a functional virtual prototyping design flow. First, a surface stabilized binary FLC cell is modeled in VHDL-AMS language on the basis of well-known theories of FLC. Some physical and environmental phenomena are added (e.g. electronic behavior of the cell, temperature, etc.) in order to improve its reliability. Once the model is validated, a virtual prototype of a FLC pixel is performed by associating the model of the FLC cell and the model of an appropriate wave generator. Simulations show that our new driving method works, but with certain limitations. The most critical one seems to be the high temperature dependence of the pixel response.