Multimode transflective liquid crystal display with a single cell gap using a self-masking process of photoalignment

We demonstrate a transflective liquid crystal display (LCD), doped with a chiral agent to produce a low helical twisting power, in a multimode configuration consisting of the homogeneous alignment and the hybrid alignment. The multimode transflective LCD was fabricated by a single-step exposure of the UV light through an array of metal reflectors used as an amplitude photomask which gives an alternating homogeneous and homeotropic LC geometry. This single-step UV exposure produces no cell gap variations. In our configuration, the electro-optical disparity between the transmissive region and the reflective region was found to be significantly reduced by the low helical twisting power of the chiral dopant.