Liquid Crystals and display R&D

[Part of a series of posts reflecting on past projects].

This was an early and formative experience of the relationship between academic instutions and their spin-offs, and between research and development, scientific study and engineering applications. Although the experience was very positive, I also saw the limits and inefficiencies in the ways these things worked. These observations helped me realized what I did not want to be doing with my career.

The science and the lab work

I spent most of my time conducting laboratory experiments to understand behavior of liquid crystal (LC) mesogens, seeking viable candidates for display applications. I created the cells, which were composed of a small sample of the LC on a glass slide in a specific physical configuration, and under a microscope I inspected the LC’s phase transitions under applied temperature and electrical fields. I’ll add a little more information about the science in the blog post linked above.

The relationship between the CU-Boulder physics lab, and the start up DisplayTech was intimate. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the two. Both groups were interested in publishing novel research, both were interested in financially lucrative applications of the science, and often it wasn’t clear to me even to which group an individual or an effort belonged. At the beginning of the summer I spent more time on campus, but by the end I was at the startup most days of the week.

Quick Reference

About FLC device technology

See papers by Noel Clark and others. For example, S. T. Lagerwall, N. A. Clark, J. Dijon & J. F. Clerc (1989) Ferroelectric liquid crystals: The development of devices, Ferroelectrics, 94:1, 3-62, DOI: 10.1080/00150198908014233.

See this 2020 article for a more recent perspective: “After a century of searching, scientists find new liquid phase”, By Daniel Strain

About the organizations

FLC-MRC - The Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal Material Research Center (FLC-MRC) was located at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was part of the Condensed Matter Laboratory in the dept of Physics. See also the Soft Materials Research Center (SMRC).

You can peruse the FLC MRC website at the Wayback machine, 2002 snapshot. More recent captures are also available.

DisplayTech - Displaytech was a startup that spun out of the FLC-MRC. The company specialized in ferroelectric liquid crystal on silicon (FLCOS) microdisplays. At the time (early 2000s) their technology was impressive in achieving high resolution and very fast switching, and had applications in viewfinders for handheld digital cameras and in rear-projection displays. DisplayTech was acquired by Micron in 2009.