Abstract
We have proposed a novel ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) mode, which has the ability of gray scale displaying with the active device such as a thin film transistor (TFT). This technology is based on the mono-stable FLC mode, which is obtained by the material with the cholesteric (Ch) - chiral smectic C (SmC^*) phase transition sequences and applying small DC voltage nearby the phase transition temperature from Ch to (SmC^*) for making the layer normal direction uniform. The electro-optical response of liquid crystal molecules under the AC voltage is asymmetric between plus and minus voltages. It shows the characteristics such as low spontaneous polarization (P_s) value, fast response time, small temperature dependency and wide tolerace to cell gap non-uniformity. Furthermore, we have made TFT prototype panels using this mode. We could confirm this mode realizing high quality moving-pictures without blurring based on the non-holding displaying and good color reproducibility based on the field sequential color method.
