Luminance control method for a given gray level by asymmetric sustain pulses in AC PDP

A possible method to control luminance of a whole panel in an ac plasma display panel (PDP) is to control a total number of sustain pulses which is called as gray level control. However, this method leads to rough step-like luminance control especially in the low gray level. In this paper, a simple and robust luminance control method of whole panel is proposed. The key feature of the proposed driving technique is application of asymmetric amplitude modulation of sustain pulses in the display period of the address, display-period separation (ADS) driving scheme. As a result, the range of luminance control by the proposed method is about 50% of the luminance for a given gray level. Moreover, it is experimentally verified that the proposed method has similar dynamic margin performances compared with the conventional method.