New high efficiency converters with quasi-sinusoidal current waveforms for PDP sustaining power module

Abstract

Plasma display panels have been considered as the best candidate of flat panel display because of its wide view angle, high contrast ratio, and long life time. Recently since PDPs tend to be lighter and contain a fan-less system for lower acoustic noise and vibration, the high efficiency, high performance, and high power density of PDP power modules are significantly necessary. Among various power modules of PDP, the sustaining power module is especially responsible for the overall system efficiency as well as its size, because most of power driving the PDP is consumed during the sustaining period. Moreover, not only the PDP features the purely capacitive load in respect to circuit operation but also it is generally driven by the address display separation method, the load variation of the sustaining power module is very wide and abrupt. Thus, the high efficiency of the sustaining power module is needed along wide load ranges. Also, when the PDP is operating on TV signals, the high efficiency is supposed to be more important at light loads, because the sustaining power module is usually operating at those load conditions. Among various DC/DC converters, several conventional converters are reviewed in this paper such as the asymmetrical controlled half bridge converter, phase shifted full bridge converter, and half bridge LLC resonant converter. Although these converters have many merits, they have some difficulties such as the high voltage ringing problem, high conduction losses at light loads, and narrow ZVS ranges of power switches as the sustaining power module. Therefore, in this paper, to resolve the above problems effectively, new high efficiency converters with quasi-sinusoidal current waveforms for PDP sustaining power module are proposed. These converters show the good ZVS capability, low circulating energy, low conduction losses, simple structure, and etc. To confirm the validity of proposed converters, each prototype circuit has been made for the exp...