CN100449383C - Liquid crystal display unit, manufacturing method thereof and liquid crystal display device comprising same - Google Patents

Abstract

The invention discloses a liquid crystal display unit, a manufacturing method thereof and a liquid crystal display device comprising the liquid crystal display unit. The method mainly comprises the following steps: first, a seal is formed having a main body surrounding a display area and a protrusion extending from the main body. Next, a liquid crystal material is dropped on one of the pair of substrates. Then, one of the pair of substrates is stacked on the other substrate, and alignment and assembly are performed. After the seal member is cured, the pair of substrates is cut, thereby obtaining a liquid crystal display unit. The step of forming the sealing member includes applying a sealing material to one of a pair of substrates, starting from a position outside the display area, and then applying to the display area to form a protrusion of the sealing member; then, the sealing material continues to be applied along the display area to form a main body of the sealing member.

Description

Liquid crystal display unit, manufacturing method thereof, and liquid crystal display device including same

technical field

The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display device (liquid crystal display device) and a manufacturing method thereof, in particular to a liquid crystal display device manufactured by a one drop fill (ODF) process and a manufacturing method thereof.

Background technique

Generally, a known liquid crystal display device includes a light source and a liquid crystal display cell, and the birefringence property of liquid crystal is used to control whether light passes through, thereby displaying various images. In the manufacturing process of the liquid crystal display panel, the two substrates are generally combined into a unit (cell) with a sealing material, and only one liquid crystal injection port is left, and then the liquid crystal material is injected into the narrow gap of the unit formed by the two substrates. , and finally seal the liquid crystal injection port on the unit.

At present, a new technology is proposed, that is, a process of dripping liquid crystal material on one substrate in advance, and then covering another substrate. This technology greatly reduces the number of processes in the liquid crystal display panel manufacturing process and increases manufacturing efficiency. More specifically, the manufacturing process of the drop-type injection method includes: first coating the frame glue on the entire periphery of one of the pair of substrates to form a seal, and after dripping the liquid crystal material in one of the pair of substrates , superimposing one of the pair of substrates on the other substrate, and curing the seal. It should be noted that in this method, before the liquid crystal material dripping step seals the two substrates, it is impossible to use a pure thermosetting sealant, so it is preferable that the sealant used to form the seal is a sealant Radiation-curable adhesives (such as UV-curable adhesives).

Compared with the vacuum injection method widely used in the manufacture of liquid crystal display units, the drop-type injection method manufacturing process greatly reduces the manufacturing cost of liquid crystal display units and improves the productivity of mass production because, first, this method greatly reduces the use of liquid crystal materials Second, this method reduces the time for injecting the liquid crystal material. Therefore, there is a strong demand to apply the drop injection method to the manufacturing process of liquid crystal display units.

However, since the drop injection method is used, the sealing member formed before the drop injection of the liquid crystal material surrounds the entire periphery of the display area on the substrate without leaving an opening. When the sealing member is formed by coating, in order to ensure that the formed sealing member completely surrounds the display area, the sealing member generally has an overlapping portion between the starting point and the end point of the glue coating, and the overlapping portion of this section The amount of glue applied must be more than that of other parts of the frame glue. In addition, when applying glue, the amount of glue applied at the beginning is not easy to control, resulting in the amount of glue applied at the initial point being easily too large. Therefore, after the liquid crystal material is poured and the pair of substrates are laminated, the shape of the sealing member near the starting point is often larger than a predetermined size, so that it is easy to overlap with the light-shielding matrix on the substrate. Therefore, in the step of curing the sealing member with radiation (such as ultraviolet light), the portion of the sealing member covered by the light-shielding matrix cannot be irradiated with radiation and is not cured completely. Evidence shows that these uncured sealants will interact with the liquid crystal layer, which will degrade the performance of the liquid crystal material later on.

Therefore, at present, in order to ensure that the sealing member can be fully cured without interacting with the liquid crystal material, the light-shielding matrix that blocks light on the sealing member must be kept at a relatively large distance from the sealing member, but this means that the display of the liquid crystal panel must be increased. The space outside the area, or the scope of the display area is reduced when the size of the liquid crystal panel remains unchanged. However, both the former and the latter are obviously against the development trend of liquid crystal displays.

Contents of the invention

Therefore, the present invention seeks to provide a liquid crystal display which can overcome or at least improve the aforementioned problems in the prior art.

It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a manufacturing method for sealing a liquid crystal material between two substrates using a drop-injection manufacturing process which overcomes or at least improves the aforementioned problems of the prior art.

To achieve the above and other objectives, the present invention provides a method for manufacturing a liquid crystal display unit, the main steps of which are as follows. First, a sealing member is formed, which has a protrusion surrounding the display area and a protrusion extending from the main body. Next, liquid crystal material is dispensed on one of the pair of substrates. Then, one of the pair of substrates is stacked on the other substrate, aligned and assembled. After curing the sealing member, the pair of substrates was cut, whereby a liquid crystal display unit was obtained. The sealing member forming step includes applying a sealing material on one of the pair of substrates, starting from a position outside the display area, and then applying to the display area to form the protrusion of the sealing member; and , continue to coat the sealing material along the display area to form the main body of the sealing member.

The liquid crystal display unit manufactured by the above-mentioned manufacturing method includes: a pair of substrates, a liquid crystal layer interposed between the pair of substrates, and a sealing member having a main body surrounding a display area and a protrusion extending from the main body, the sealing member Parts are arranged on the edge of the pair of substrates to fix one substrate on the other substrate. In addition, the invention also provides a liquid crystal display device comprising the liquid crystal display unit.

The liquid crystal display unit manufacturing method provided by the present invention can make the coating starting point of the sealing material (which usually has an excessive amount of sealing material) far away from the display area, so the width of the sealing member (especially its overlapping area) can be controlled more precisely , so that the seal does not overlap the light-shielding matrix. Since the width of the sealing member (especially its overlapping area) can be accurately controlled, there is no need to reserve too much space between the sealing member and the light-shielding substrate to ensure that the formed sealing member does not overlap with the light-shielding substrate .

Description of drawings

In order to make the above and other objects, features, and advantages of the present invention more apparent, preferred embodiments of the present invention are specifically listed below and described in detail with accompanying drawings.

1 is a partially cutaway view of a liquid crystal display unit according to an embodiment of the present invention;

Fig. 2-4 shows the main steps of the method for manufacturing a liquid crystal display unit according to an embodiment of the present invention with a perspective view; and

FIG. 5 is an exploded perspective view of a liquid crystal display assembly according to an embodiment of the present invention.

Detailed ways

1 and 4 illustrate a liquid crystal display unit 100 according to an embodiment of the present invention. Referring to FIG. 1, the liquid crystal display unit 100 includes a substrate 102, a substrate 104, a liquid crystal layer 106 sandwiched between the substrates 102 and 104, and a sealing member 110 (see FIG. 4), and the sealing member 110 seals the liquid crystal layer. 106. The liquid crystal layer of the liquid crystal display unit 100 is formed by a drop injection method.

With reference to Fig. 1, substrate 102 is a color filter substrate, is provided with: a plurality of color filter regions 112 (represented by a color filter region 112 in Fig. 1), between adjacent color filter regions 112 A light-shielding matrix 114 between them, and a transparent electrode 116 covering substantially the entire surface of the substrate 102 . The substrate 104 is a thin film transistor substrate, on which a plurality of parallel data lines (not shown in the figure), a plurality of parallel gate lines (not shown in the figure), and a plurality of parallel gate lines (not shown in the figure), arranged on each data line and gate The thin film transistor 118 at the intersection of the pole lines and the pixel electrode 120 arranged in each area defined by the intersecting data line and gate line correspond to the color filter area 112 on the substrate 102 . The liquid crystal display unit 100 has a display area 122 (see FIG. 4 ), and the pixel electrodes 120 or the color filter regions 112 are roughly distributed in the range of the display area.

The invention is characterized by the design of the seal 110 and the method of formation. Referring to FIG. 4 , the sealing member 110 is disposed on the edges of the substrates 102 and 104 to fix the substrate 102 on the substrate 104 and seal the liquid crystal layer 106 . The sealing member 110 has a main body 110 a surrounding the display area 122 and a protrusion 110 b extending from the main body 110 a. The main body 110a can be a rectangle with at least four sides. More specifically, the liquid crystal layer 106 is formed between the display area 122 surrounded by the main body 110a of the sealing member.

It can be understood that the pair of substrates of the liquid crystal display unit may also be a multilayer color filter (color filter on array, COA) and an opposite substrate having a common electrode. In addition, the pair of substrates of the liquid crystal display unit can also be an In-Plane Switching Mode (In-Plane Switching Mode) TFT substrate and an opposite substrate respectively.

2-4, the seal 110 is formed by the following steps. Referring to FIGS. 2-3 , firstly, a syringe 202 is used to coat a sealing material (or frame glue) 204 on a glass substrate 206 . It can be understood that, in order to improve the manufacturing efficiency, usually when manufacturing the liquid crystal display unit 100 , a large glass substrate 206 is used to manufacture a plurality of liquid crystal display units 100 at the same time. The syringe 202 has a needle 202a, and the sealing material 204 in the syringe 202 is extruded from the needle 202a and coated on the glass substrate 206 by pressurizing with gas (nitrogen is generally used). Since the sealing material 204 is extruded by the gas pressure, the coating amount of the sealing material 204 will be unstable, so that the sealing member 110 will be uneven in size at the starting point 208 of coating. More specifically, the pressure of the extruded air needs to be increased above the pressure value required to coat the sealing material 204 at the starting point 208 of coating, so it is easy to have an excess of sealing material 204 at the starting point 208 of coating . Therefore, the present invention provides a novel coating method. With reference to FIG. 2 , the needle 202a of the syringe 202 is set to start coating from a predetermined position outside the display area 122, and then the sealing material 204 is made to The direction of the display area 122 extends to form the protruding portion 110b of the sealing member 110; referring to FIG. 3 , then, continue to coat the sealing material 204 along the display area 122 in the direction of the arrow until a small overlapping area is formed. 210 , thereby forming the main body 110 a of the sealing member 110 around the display area 122 . Preferably, the main body 110a and the protruding portion 110b of the sealing member are formed by one-time coating. In this way, the coating starting point 208 of the sealing material 204 is kept away from the display area 122, so the width and volume of the sealing member (especially its overlapping region 210) can be controlled more precisely, so that the sealing member 110 formed after pressing will not Overlapping the light-shielding matrix 114 (see FIG. 1 ).

Then, other manufacturing steps can be performed, such as dispensing the liquid crystal material on the glass substrate 206 . Then, another glass substrate (not shown in the figure) is stacked on the glass substrate 206 . At this time, the liquid crystal material is surrounded by the main body 110 a of the sealing member 110 to form the liquid crystal layer 106 .

After the seal 110 is cured, thereby securing the substrate 206 to another substrate (not shown), the pair of substrates are cut along a cutting line 212 (see FIG. 3 ). It should be noted that the cutting line 212 is located outside the predetermined display area 122 and may traverse the protrusion 110b of the seal. After the cutting step, a plurality of liquid crystal display units 100 (as shown in FIG. 4 ) are obtained. It is understood that the substrate 102 or 104 may be one of a plurality of substrates on a pair of mother glasses.

It should be noted that in this method, before the liquid crystal material dripping step seals the two substrates, it is impossible to use a pure thermosetting sealant. Therefore, it is preferable that the sealing material used to form the sealing member 110 is a A sealant for a radiation curable adhesive such as a UV curable adhesive.

The liquid crystal display unit provided by the present invention can be used in a liquid crystal display device, as shown in FIG. 5 . The liquid crystal display device 500 includes a liquid crystal display unit 100, a light source (backlight device) 502 arranged under the liquid crystal display unit 100 for illuminating the liquid crystal display unit 100, and a frame 504 combined with the backlight device 502, through which The frame combines the liquid crystal display unit 100 and the backlight device 502 into the liquid crystal display device 500 . The liquid crystal display assembly 500 also includes two printed circuit boards (PCB) 506 and 508 for transmitting control and driving signals to the liquid crystal display unit 100 through a tape carrier package (TCP) 510 .

The liquid crystal display unit manufacturing method provided by the present invention can not only use the lower cost and time-saving drop-type injection method to form its liquid crystal layer, but also can accurately control the width of the sealing member (especially its overlapping area), so in the sealing member Between the light-shielding substrate and the light-shielding substrate, there is no need to reserve too much space to ensure that the formed sealing member does not overlap with the light-shielding substrate.

Although the present invention has been described with the aforementioned preferred embodiment, this embodiment is not intended to limit the present invention, and those skilled in the art can make various changes and modifications without departing from the spirit and scope of the present invention, so the present invention The scope of protection is defined by the appended claims.

Claims (18)

1. A method for manufacturing at least one liquid crystal display unit, comprising the steps of: forming a seal having a main body surrounding the display area and a protrusion extending from the main body, wherein the seal is formed by: applying a sealing material to one of the pair of substrates from a location other than the display area and then applying to the display area to form a protrusion of the seal; and After forming the protruding portion, continue to apply the sealing material along the display area to form the main body of the sealing member with an overlapping area, wherein the starting position of the sealing material coating is different from the overlapping area, and the overlapping area is along the One side of the display area is extended; dripping a liquid crystal material onto at least one of the pair of substrates; superimposing one of the pair of substrates on the other substrate such that the liquid crystal material is surrounded by the sealant; curing the seal; The pair of substrates are cut to obtain the liquid crystal display unit. 2. The method of claim 1, wherein the sealing material is a radiation curable adhesive. 3. The method of claim 1, wherein one of the pair of substrates has a light-shielding matrix, and the sealing member does not overlap a vertical projection area of the light-shielding matrix at all. 4. The method of claim 1, wherein the cutting step is performed along a cut line of one of the pair of substrates, the cut line crossing the protrusion of the seal. 5. A liquid crystal display unit, comprising: a first substrate; a second substrate; a liquid crystal layer formed of a liquid crystal material and sandwiched between the first substrate and the second substrate; and a sealing member, which is arranged between the first substrate and the second substrate, and is used to fix the first substrate on the second substrate, wherein the sealing member has a main body surrounding the display area and a protrusion extending from the main body, Wherein the seal is formed by the following steps: applying a sealing material to one of the pair of substrates from a position outside the display area and then applying to the display area to form the protrusion of the sealing member; and After forming the protruding portion, continue to apply the sealing material along the display area to form the main body of the sealing member with an overlapping area, wherein the starting position of the sealing material coating is different from the overlapping area, and the overlapping area is along the One side of the display area is extended. 6. The liquid crystal display unit as claimed in claim 5, wherein the sealing material is a radiation curable adhesive. 7. The liquid crystal display unit as claimed in claim 5, wherein the first substrate has a light-shielding matrix, and the sealing member does not overlap the vertical projection area of the light-shielding matrix at all. 8. A liquid crystal display device, comprising at least one backlight module and a liquid crystal display unit, wherein the liquid crystal display unit comprises: a first substrate; a second substrate; a liquid crystal layer formed of a liquid crystal material and sandwiched between the first substrate and the second substrate; and A seal, which is arranged between the first substrate and the second substrate, is used to fix the first substrate on the second substrate, wherein the seal has a main body surrounding the display area and extending from the main body out of a protrusion, wherein the seal is formed by the following steps: applying a sealing material to one of the pair of substrates from a position outside the display area and then applying to the display area to form the protrusion of the sealing member; and After forming the protruding portion, continue to apply the sealing material along the display area to form the main body of the sealing member with an overlapping area, wherein the starting position of the sealing material coating is different from the overlapping area, and the overlapping area is along the extending along one side of the display area. 9. The liquid crystal display device as claimed in claim 8, wherein the sealing material is a radiation curable adhesive. 10. The liquid crystal display device as claimed in claim 8, wherein the first substrate has a light-shielding matrix, and the sealing member does not overlap the vertical projection area of the light-shielding matrix at all. 11. A liquid crystal display unit comprising: a first substrate; a second substrate; A seal, which is arranged between the first substrate and the second substrate, is used to fix the first substrate on the second substrate, wherein the seal has a main body surrounding the display area, and the main body includes an overlapping area, and the seal has only one protrusion extending from the body, wherein the seal starts at a different point than the overlapping area, and the overlapping area extends along one side of the display area; and A liquid crystal layer is formed of liquid crystal material and sandwiched between the first substrate and the second substrate, and is formed between the display area surrounded by the main body of the sealing member. 12. The liquid crystal display unit as claimed in claim 11, wherein the main body has at least four sides. 13. The liquid crystal display unit as claimed in claim 12, wherein the main body is a rectangle. 14. The liquid crystal display unit as claimed in claim 11, wherein the first substrate has a light-shielding matrix, and the sealing member does not overlap the vertical projection area of the light-shielding matrix at all. 15. A liquid crystal display device comprising at least one backlight module and a liquid crystal display unit, wherein the liquid crystal display unit comprises: a first substrate; a second substrate; A seal, which is arranged between the first substrate and the second substrate, is used to fix the first substrate on the second substrate, wherein the seal has a main body surrounding the display area, and the main body includes a an overlapping area having only a protrusion extending from the main body, wherein the sealing material coating start position is different from the overlapping area, and the overlapping area extends along one side of the display area; and A liquid crystal layer is formed of liquid crystal material and sandwiched between the first substrate and the second substrate, and is formed between the display area surrounded by the main body of the sealing member. 16. The liquid crystal display device as claimed in claim 15, wherein the first substrate has a light-shielding matrix, and the sealing member does not overlap the vertical projection area of the light-shielding matrix at all. 17. The liquid crystal display device as claimed in claim 15, wherein the main body has at least four sides. 18. The liquid crystal display device as claimed in claim 17, wherein the main body is a rectangle.

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