Substances forming calamitic mesophases have been known for more than 100 years but only the recent, rapid advance in active matrix liquid crystal display (AM‐LCD) technology helped these materials to achieve the crucial position in flat panel display technology they hold today. Due to their high contrast, large viewing angle, and rapid switching times, modern AM‐LCDs offer a superior picture quality even compared to conventional cathode ray tubes. Their flatness, low weight, and low energy consumption render them the technology of choice for all kinds of portable devices. Some of the future promises of AM‐LCD technology are centered around the development of liquid crystalline materials for the different subtypes of active matrix applications. This development is aimed, on the one hand, towards improved electrooptical and viscoelastic properties; on the other hand, the increasing performance of LCDs leads to extremely stringent reliability demands on the liquid crystals. Responding to these high standards of performance and quality, most liquid crystals for contemporary AM‐LCD applications are multiply fluorinated compounds with very high purities, as is typical for materials used in the electronics industry. The synthesis of these superfluorinated materials (SFMs) often requires specialized methods, which, in several cases, had to be introduced for the first time into the canon of industrial production. The immense market pressure, as well as the rapid advance of AM‐LCD technology on the side of the display manufacturers, urges an increasing pace of the materials development. This demand for new materials can no longer be fulfilled by conventional trial‐and‐error approaches. As in the pharmaceutical industry, in the search for new, superior liquid crystals, the purely empirical methods are increasingly supported by a rational design based on computational methods.

New liquid crystals with very low viscosity, good mesophase behavior, and high reliability are necessary to achieve the breakthrough from flat computer monitors to large displays for television. Fluorine plays a decisive role not only because of the polarity it induces in organic molecules but also because of its low polarizability and weak propensity for ion solvation. In addition, subtle stereoelectronic effects in fluorine-containing liquid crystals influence material properties and allow these to be tuned to some extent to achieve the desired outcome. Some fairly sophisticated chemistry is required that is normally ruled out in the specialty chemicals industry because of cost. The television display market is now entering a phase of saturation. The broad availability of the internet has led to an ever increasing tendency for mobile products. Tablet PCs and smartphones require touch-panel functionality and low power consumption. New LCD modes with high-performance liquid crystals and additional components, such as polymerizable materials, can be used in such products.

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The somewhat “exotic” pentafluorosulfuranyl functionality is one of the strongest electron‐withdrawing groups with a purely inductive effect. Owing to its chemical stability and the resulting high dipole moment of its aromatic derivatives, this group was crucial to the design and synthesis of a new class of highly polar liquid crystals (such as 1) for application in active matrix displays. A computational model was developed with the aim to understand and predict the electrooptic properties of liquid crystals based on hypervalent sulfur fluorides.