Low Cost Driving System for Plasma Display Panels by Eliminating Path Switches and Merging Power Switches

Recently, plasma display panels (PDP) have become the most promising candidate in the market for large screen size flat panel displays. 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 and a scan switch to offer a scan voltage for reset and scan operations, respectively. 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 power for the plasma discharge accompanied by a large current is 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.