Patent
1986-12-16
1989-11-07
Miller, Stanley D.
350334, 350336, 350349, G02F 113
Patent
active
048787418
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
CROSS-REFERENCES TO RELATED PATENTS
Reference is made to U.S. Pats. No. 4,435,047, 4,579,423, 4,606,611, 4,596,445, and 4,556,289, and commonly assigned applications Ser. No. 477,242, filed Mar. 21, 1983: No. 480,461, filed Mar. 30, 1983; No. 585,883, filed Mar. 2, 1984; and No. 608,135, filed May 8, 1984, the entire disclosures of which hereby are incorporated by reference.
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates generally, as indicated, to liquid crystal color displays and methods, and, more particularly, to the use of substractive color principles in a multi-layer and/or multicolor liquid crystal display to obtain selected color outputs that may be used to provide a constant or static output image and/or a dynamic or moving image, for example analogous to that produced by a color television. The invention also relates to the scanning, e.g. in the sense of selectively addressing, of respective multicolor portions of a liquid crystal color display apparatus to enable the multiple coloring of the light output, e.g. like a color television picture tube.
BACKGROUND
Liquid crystal material currently is used in a wide variety of devices, including, for example, optical devices such as visual displays. A property of liquid crystal enabling use in visual displays is the ability to scatter and/or to absorb light when the liquid crystal is in a random alignment (sometimes referred to herein as distorted alignment) and the ability to transmit light when the liquid crystal is in an ordered alignment (sometimes referred to herein as parallel alignment).
Examples of electrically responsive liquid crystal material and use thereof are found in the above patent(s) and applications and in U.S. Pat. No. 3,322,485. Certain types of liquid crystal material are responsive to a prescribed input, such as temperature or electrical input (e.g. electric field, voltage, frequency), changing the optical characteristics and/or the random or ordered alignment of the liquid crystal material, in response to such prescribed input.
Currently there are three categories of liquid crystal materials, namely choleteric, nematic and smectic. The present invention preferably uses nematic liquid crystal material or a combination of nematic and some cholesteric type. More specifically, the liquid crystal material preferably is operationally nematic, i.e. it acts as nematic material and not as the other types. Operationally nematic means that in the absence of external fields structural distortion of the liquid crystal is dominated by the orientation of the liquid crystal at its boundaries rather than by bulk effects, such as very strong twists, as in cholesteric material, or layering, as in smectic material. The operationally nematic material may include nematic and cholesteric liquid crystal materials. Thus, for example, operationally nematic liquid crystal with chiral ingredients, which induce a tendency to twist but cannot overcome the effects of boundary alignment, still would be operationally nematic.
Hereinbelow the liquid crystal of the invention primarily will be referred to interchangeably and equivalently as nematic or as operationally nematic. Although various characteristics of the various liquid crystal materials are described in the prior art, one known characteristic is that of reversibility, e.g. of physical, structural, optical and/or electrical properties, as a prescribed input is applied or removed. Particularly, nematic liquid crystal material is known to be reversible, but cholesteric material ordinarily is not reversible.
Usually liquid crystal material is anisotropic both optically (birefringence) and, for example in the case of nematic material, electrically. The optical anisotropy is manifest by the scattering or absorption, especially when pleochroic dye is in solution with the liquid crystal material, of light when the liquid crystal material is in random alignment, and the transmission of light, especially in a particular direction related to an axis of the liquid crystal structure, through the liquid cryst
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Mai Hug K.
Manchester R & D Partnership
Miller Stanley D.
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