Design, manufacturing and application of polymer particles with or without metal coating for use as spacers in Liquid Crystal Displays

Norwegian particle technology have been of a very high international standard for decades, not least due to ground-breaking R&D at SINTEF / NTNU. Conpart has through the supply agreement signed with a world leading manufacturer already shown that this tec hnology represents a very interesting alternative also for use in the electronics industry. In this proposed project Conpart aims at the market for both non-conductive and conductive spacers used in the manufacturing of LCDs. Until now, this market has been dominated by Japanese suppliers. The main problem with traditional spacer technology has been an uneven spacer uniformity combined with spacers located in the optical active part of the display, reducing both the uniformity and contrast ratio of the display. The result has been the development of photo-definable spacers. However, this technology is both costly due to a number of additional processes and is little environmental friendly due to a lot of material waste. The project addresses both the manufacturing of the spacer particles specially prepared to have adhesive properties as well as inkjet technology for uniform deposition of the spacers in non-active areas of the display. The total MNT ERA-Net project will be lead by Conpart. Sintef wil l be strongly involved in developing the adhesive properties of the particles. The mechnical testing of the particles that has been done in close collaboration with NTNU in other projects (BIP: Hybrid Particles and KMB: NanoPCP) will be critical input to this project. Ongoing projects at SINTEF regarding surface coating of polymers are also important input this project.