Presentation Abstract
Reflective Liquid Crystal Displays (RLCDs) provide unique opportunities for low-power sunlight-readable displays. The manufacturing is well-established and cost-effective. The performance in bright ambient environments is competitive with some of the best displays today at a fraction of the power. However, under low ambient lighting, the displays appear gray and washed out. The industry’s solution has been to make the RLCDs partially transmissive and use a backlight. These “transflective” LCDs sacrifice much of the power, color and cost advantages of a purely reflective LCD.
Reflective LCDs are challenging to front-light because they are more mirror-like and anisotropic than the electrophoretic displays used in e-readers. This complex reflectivity profile enables improved color performance, but requires precisely functionalized frontlighting. Since the light source is on the viewer-side of the display, the traditional optical films used in backlighting cannot be utilized. In this talk, we present current methods for optimizing the performance of the RLCD module with a transparent, functionalized frontlight. We show that properly matching the Azumo frontlight to the RLCD reflectance map improves the color and contrast without sacrificing the sunlit performance.
Dr. Tony Nichol
Dr. Tony Nichol is CTO and a founding member of Azumo with nearly 20 years of experience in lightguide development. As a National Science Foundation Research Fellow, he holds a PhD from MIT focusing on 3D diffractive optical systems and nanofabrication. His expertise is in non-imaging optical design, micro/nano fabrication, precision manufacturing and numerical simulation. He previously worked in 3M’s Optical Systems Division and is listed as inventor on over 80 U.S. and foreign patents. He holds a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin.