A resonant driver with functionally shared devices for plasma display panels

A sustain circuit with energy recovery and injection circuit is proposed based on reduced number of low-cost and low-rating devices for plasma display panels (PDPs). The proposed driver configures the sustain circuit and the resonant network in such a way that some of circuit components can function for both sustain and energy recovery/injection operations. Due to the semiconductor devices shared in common as well as simplified arrangement, the developed structure can be designed with fewer devices than the conventional approaches with all devices operated individually. Moreover, since the proposed driver is designed with low voltage-rating devices compared with the conventional 2 and 3 level based driver, it can take advantages of semiconductor devices with lower conduction and switching losses as well as cheaper costs. The proposed driver generates such five-level sustain voltage waveforms as a cascaded Weber-type driver, which results in reduced rms values of panel displacement currents and lowered power losses. As a result, the PDP driver presented in this paper can feature reduced number of low voltage rating devices, smaller size, and high efficiency.