A Study on High Frequency Sustaining Driver for Improving Luminance Efficiency of AC-PDP

Plasma display panel (PDP) has a serious thermal problem, because the luminance efficiency of the conventional PDP is about 1.5 lm/W and it is less than 3-5 lm/W of 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 adopt the driving PDP at high frequency range from 400 kHz up to over 700 kHz. 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 PDP at high frequency range. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the parasitic components of PDP itself and driver when the reactive energy of panel is recovered. Various drivers are classified and evaluated whether it is suitable for high frequency driver, and finally current-fed type with DC input voltage biased is proposed. This driver overcomes the effect of parasitic component in panel and driver and fully achieves 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