We have deposited silicon nitride films by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) at 250 °C with properties similar to films prepared at 700 °C by low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD). Films are prepared using silane and nitrogen source gases with helium dilution. The film properties, including N/Si ratio, hydrogen content and electrical quality are most sensitive to changes in the silane flow rate during deposition. For films deposited under optimized conditions at a substrate temperature of 250 °C, current versus voltage measurements in metal-insulator-semiconductor structures show the onset of carrier injection at 3–4 MV/cm, slightly lower than LPCVD films. When bias-stressed to 2 MV/cm, capacitance versus voltage measurements show some hysteretic behavior and evidence for positive fixed charge, similar to LPCVD films. For the optimized films: N/Si=1.33±.02; refractive index (λ=6328 Å)=1.980±0.01; dielectric constant (1 MHz) ∼7.5; density=2.7±0.1; and the etch rate in 10% buffered HF ranges from 32 to 70 Å/min. In addition, the hydrogen is distributed equally in Si-H and N-H groups, with a total hydrogen content <10 at.%. These films have a significantly lower hydrogen content than observed in other PECVD silicon nitride films deposited at this temperature. When the substrate temperature is increased to 350 °C, the films have the same Si/N ratio, and similar electrical properties; the hydrogen content is reduced to <6×1021 cm−3, and the etch rate is 17 Å/s in 10% buffered HF solution.

The compensation principle to reduce the off-axis light leakage of crossed polarizers is investigated.After optimizing the retardation films, the simulation results show that the black state of viewing angle of compensated TN and VA modes can be made wider than the angle of view of crossed polarizers. The results are also confirmed by the test cells.

We propose a fast two-step switching method of a homogeneous-aligned liquid crystal (LC) cell, where a trigger pulse is applied to align LCs vertically for a moment before they are in-plane switched to show a bright state. Because LCs aligned vertically by a trigger pulse are in a transient state rather than the stable state, the turn-on becomes faster. The turn-off also becomes faster because the pulse forcibly aligns the LC vertically to show the dark state. Experimental results show that significant acceleration of the grey-to-grey response as well as onoff switching can be achieved by the proposed switching method. #

A novel driving scheme, named Dynamic Capacitance Compensation (DCC), for active-matrix (AM) LCDs was developed. It takes the charge-&-hold nature of AM-LCDs into consideration to enhance the switching speed. By incorporating DCC and faster liquid crystal, a TFT-LCD whose response time was less than 10 ms for all gray levels with the on + off time of 8.4 ms was developed. DCC can be applied to any kind of LCD modes to reduce the gray response time to less than 1 frame.

This paper reports on the electro-optic characteristics of vertical alignment (VA) liquid crystal (LC) cells with liquid crystalline polymer networks. Optical bouncing, that occurs during the turn-on of VA cells, can be eliminated by introducing in-cell polymer networks. Furthermore, the turn-off also becomes much faster because of the anchoring effect caused by the anisotropy in the molecular shape of the liquid crystalline polymers. These response times have been found to vary for different LC/prepolymer mixtures. When the concentration of the liquid crystalline prepolymer in the initial LC/prepolymer mixture was 3, 5, or 10 wt %, the response times were measured to be 34, 56, and 87% faster than those of a VA cell with pure LC. These switching behaviors of VA cells with liquid crystalline polymer networks are demonstrated and compared with those using pure LC and with polymer networks made of isotropic prepolymers.