CIM based soft switching of energy recovery sustain driver for AC PDPs with reduced sustain voltage

AC-PDP (plasma display panel) uses a high sustain voltage and its power consumption is also high so that circuit cost is expensive. An energy recovery circuit for AC-PDPs with reduced sustain voltage was proposed to solve these disadvantages. However, the circuit has disadvantage that the switching elements are operated with hard-switching at the start point of discharge. The reason is that the panel voltage is lower than sustain voltage at that point. In this paper, we propose the improved driving method that switching devices are operated with soft-switching by using CIM (current injection method). Finally, the validity of the proposed driving method is verified by simulations and experimentation.