A study on the discharge from various ramp waveforms in shadow mask plasma display panel

Summary form only given. The weak discharge during the reset ramp period plays an important part in lowering the background luminance and improving contrast ratio of plasma display panel (PDP). In order to reduce the reset discharge intensity while keeping proper addressing state, influence of the reset waveform has been studied for the novel shadow mask PDP (SMPDP) in this paper. The discharge process of different ramp waveforms was investigated by both simulation and experiment methods. In the experiment, the test panel was lightened in the form of isolated pixels. Results showed that the background luminance and contrast ratio of SMPDP can be improved greatly after optimizing the reset ramp waveform. According to the results, the pulses of weak discharge were separate with each other, and the first weak discharge pulse was stronger than others. The intensity of the reset discharge decreased with the reduction of the slope while the number of the weak discharge increased. The discharge became weaker as the ramp-up voltage rose while the slope was fixed, and the number of the weak discharge pulses increased, which ensured to form proper wall voltage. Address delay time was also studied with various reset waveforms during a reset period. The simulation results coincided well with the results that got from the experiment. Accordingly, a proper ramp waveform could be found for SMPDP.