New high-performance energy-recovery sustaining drivers for plasma display panel

Abstract

Recently, since a plasma display panel (PDP) has advantages such as the wide viewing angle, long lifetime, light weight, thin thickness, high contrast and easiness of large size, it is widely spread with more and more attention to the large area wall-hanging display. Since a PDP is composed of sustaining (X) and scanning (Y) electrodes covered with a dielectric layer, there is an intrinsic capacitance $C_p$ between two electrodes so that it can be equivalently regarded as a capacitance load $C_p$. Therefore, when a high ac square sustaining voltage $V_s$ is applied between the sustaining (X) and scanning (Y) electrodes to emit visible light, a large amount of energy of $2C_p V_s^2$ during charging and discharging transitions per each cycle is dissipated in the parasitic resistance of the circuit and wire. Furthermore, an excessive surge current during these transitions increases the current rating of switches, and causes EMI and thermal problems. In this dissertation, to overcome these problems, several new high-performance energy-recovery sustaining drivers for the PDP are proposed. First, a new high-performance series-resonance energy-recovery circuit (ERC) for the PDP is proposed. Two different ERCs are used for both sides of the PDP, and the slow discharging and fast charging transitions are employed. The ERC-X using an LC resonance biased by $0.5V_s$ discharges the PDP slowly to zero. The slow discharging transition makes the current stress on the ERC-X lower than that on the ERC-Y and the PDP discharged to zero without a severe hard switching. The ERC-Y using an LC resonance biased by $V_s$ charges the PDP quickly to $V_s$. Thus, the PDP is fully charged to $V_s$. Furthermore, there is no severe voltage notch due to the gas-discharge current compensation. Secondly, a new high-performance energy-recovery sustaining driver employing an asymmetric current injection method (CIM) for the PDP is proposed. The ERC-X discharges the PDP slowly to ze...