Cost-effective driving system for plasma displays by replacing and combining functions of power switches

A plasma display panel (PDP) has become the most promising candidate in the market for large screen size flat panel display. PDPs have many merits such as a fast display response time and wide viewing angle. However, there are still concerns about high cost because they require complex driving circuits composed of high power switching devices to generate various voltage waveforms for three operational modes of reset, scan, and sustain. Conventional PDP driving circuits use path switches for voltage separation. In addition, there exist reset switches to initialize PDPs by regulating the wall charge conditions with ramp shaped pulses, which means the necessity of specific power devices for the reset operation. Because powers for the plasma discharge accompanied by large currents are transferred to a panel via path switches, high power rating switches are used for path switches. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel low-cost PDP driving scheme achieved by not only eliminating path switches but also merging the function of reset switches into other switches used for sustain or scan operations. The simulated voltage waveforms of the proposed topology and experimental results implemented in a 42-inch panel to demonstrate the validity of using a new gate driver that merges the functions of power switches, are presented.