Optical Compensation of Liquid Crystal Materials Using Negative Birefringence Compensation Films

Abstract
A unique optical compensation film, based on a negative birefringence material, is shown to significantly improve the viewing angle characteristics of liquid crystal display (LCD) devices. A super-twist nematic (STN) LCD was used as basis for our numerical simulations. The performance of the negative birefringence compensation film for the STN LCD was modeled using a 4×4 matrix calculation and then compared with the ideal positive birefringence compensator of the double layer STN (D-STN).