High Frequency and High Luminance AC-PDP Sustaining Driver

Plasma display panels (PDPs) have a serious thermal problem, because the luminance efficiency of a conventional PDP is about 1.5 1m/W and it is less than $3\~5\;lm/W$ of a cathode ray tube (CRT). Thus there is a need for improving the luminance efficiency of the PDP. There are several approaches to improve the luminance efficiency of the PDP and we adopted a driving PDP at high frequency range from 400kHz up to over 700kHz. Since a PDP is regarded as an equivalent inherent capacitance, many types of sustaining drivers have been proposed and widely used to recover the energy stored in the PDP. However, these circuits have some drawbacks for driving PDPs at high frequency ranges. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the parasitic components on the PDP itself and on the driver when the reactive energy of the panel is recovered. Various drivers are classified and evaluated based on their suitability for high frequency drivers. Finally, a current-fed driver with a DC input voltage bias is proposed. This driver overcomes the effect of parasitic components in the panel and driver. It fully achieves a ZVS of all full-bridge switches and reduces the transition time of the panel polarity. It is tested to validate the high frequency sustaining driver and the experimental results are presented.