A Study on the Parallel Patterning of Nickel Oxide thin Film for Liquid Crystal Display

I investigated the homogeneous liquid crystal alignment using parallel patterning on nickel oxide thin film. Nickel oxide thin film was prepared by sol-gel process, which is and cost effective method to form oxide thin film. Since the sol-gel process is solution driven method, the patterning on nickel oxide can be achieved by imprinting lithography. Nickel oxide with parallel pattern was used for liquid crystal alignment layer, which can be a alternative to conventional rubbing process to aligning a liquid crystal molecules. As a result, a high transmittance of 83.9% was confirmed for the NiO film, and a stable horizontal orientation pretilt angle of 0.2° occurred in the imprinted NiO film. These results were judged to be a positive level that can be commercialized in the horizontal alignment type liquid crystal display that is currently used universally. Anisotropic characteristics of nickel oxide induced by a parallel pattern leads to the alignment of liquid crystals.