Advanced Liquid Crystal Materials
Merck LC materials for innovative technologies
Liquid crystals developed by Merck address today's most important challenges in the display industry: natural presentation of moving pictures, very high contrast and lower energy consumption.
Your advantage - Unprecedented display performance
Merck's advanced materials for novel technologies, for instance Polymer-Stabilized Vertical Alignment (PS-VA), push the limits even further and open the door to unprecedented display performance. Close cooperation with our customers and fast upscaling of production and manufacturing processes for new materials result in a short time to market - translating innovations into products faster. With Merck as a partner, LCD manufacturers can stay ahead.
Applications - More freedom for LCD designs
PS-VA displays make very fast switching, very high contrast and high transmission possible, thereby significantly reducing backlight power. This prolongs battery lifetime in mobile devices and reduces the amount of power consumed by TV sets. Lower backlight power, as well as the PS-VA specific LCD electrode layout, provide cost benefits for the LCD maker. All these different advantageous features can be flexibly tailored to the application. Already incorporated in initial commercial applications, the flexibility of the PS-VA concept has been used to optimize very different LCD performance parameters: ultimate resolution in mobile phones, high contrast and color saturation in portable gaming devices, and ultimate static contrast in TVs. The basic strength of PS-VA is the new degree of freedom it gives to LCD design and layout - thus allowing for cutting-edge solutions beyond the conventional LCD modes.
The technology - What are advanced liquid crystal materials?
Based on our continuous R&D work on new LC materials, Merck offers state-of-the-art LC mixtures for each of the conventional LC modes - whether TN-TFT, IPS or VA. Going one step further, we are looking at "advanced" materials for future displays - offering more than an evolutionary step ahead. The most prominent example for this is Polymer-Stabilized Vertical Alignment (PS-VA), a novel liquid crystal display technology related to Vertical Alignment (VA) technology, but with various significant differences - not least the need for novel LC mixture formulations. In case of PS-VA, a polymerizable LC (= reactive mesogen) is the key component of the LC mixture. In the PS-VA process step at the panel manufacturer, the reactive mesogen is polymerized by UV light under application of a voltage to the LCD panel. For well-suited LC mixtures, display layout and process conditions, a local small deviation of the LC orientation from the vertical direction ("tilt") is generated which can significantly enhance LCD performance.
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