Scan-during-sustain method for driving a high resolution AC plasma display panel

Abstract

A new method for driving a high resolution AC plasma display panel (PDP) is proposed. The proposed scan-during-sustain (SDS) method is based on the selective erase method for driving an AC PDP, and can drive an SXGA-class (1280 x 1024 pixels) AC PDP without physically dividing the panel electrodes. To overcome the problem of an unacceptably long scan time, the row electrodes of the AC PDP are grouped into eight blocks, with one or two blocks being addressed while the others are sustaining previous states. In each block, the grey levels are implemented using the address-display-period-separation (ADS) method. The scan pulses for the blocks being addressed are applied concurrently with the sustain pulses in the other blocks. An SXGA drive circuit adopting the proposed method has been built and tested on a 40 inch VGA (640 x 480 pixels) AC PDP. Experimental results show that the proposed method can drive 256 grey-level SXGA PDPs with a sufficient sustain margin.