Luminance Control for given gray level by the Asymmetric Sustain Pulse in ac PDP

Need of a dimmer function becomes more important with increasing interest on a HDTV for home theater applications. In a conventional ac PDP, a possible method to reduce luminance of a whole panel is to reduce a total number of sustain pulses and then to change the gray level. However, the reduction of the total sustain number causes the step of luminance to be rough Moreover, it is impossible to control the luminance of the panel for a given gray level. In this paper, a simple and robust method is proposed to control linearly the luminance of whole panel by applying the asymmetric sustain pulses in the display period of the ADS driving scheme. As the range of luminance control by the proposed method is about 50% for a given gray level. Moreover, it is experimentally verified that the proposed method shows similar dynamic margin performances compare with the conventional method.