High-Performance Sustain Driver for Plasma Display

The sustain driver for ac plasma display should provide alternating high-voltage pulses to ignite plasma and recover the energy discharged from the intrinsic capacitance between the scanning and sustaining electrodes inside the panel. In this paper, an efficient sustain circuit that employs a voltage boost-up function is proposed to achieve faster rise-time that would be suitable for the wide use of the address-and-display-period-separated (ADS) driving method. The proposed sustain driver improves recovery efficiency, regardless of the variation of the panel capacitance. The principle of operation, features, and simulation results are given and verified on a 7.5-in-diagonal panel at a 200-kHz operating frequency based on an experimental prototype