Improving luminous efficiency of AC-type plasma display panels by adjusting the state of sustaining discharges in the sustaining period

In this paper, a novel sustaining driving waveform for ac-type plasma display panels is proposed. Significant improvement of the luminous efficiency can be achieved. The improvement comes from introducing self-erase discharges into the sustaining period. The self-erase discharge not only changes the sustaining discharge into a more efficient state, but also emits visible light additionally. Experimental verification under the same luminance 600 cd/m/sup 2/ is performed on a 42-in plasma display panel. It is shown that the proposed sustaining driving approach consumes less power in the process of light emission by about 146 W than the conventional sustaining driving approach.