Dynamics of a coplanar-electrode plasma display panel cell. I. Basic operation

Plasma display panels (PDPs) are a technology for large-area high-brightness flat panel displays. There is considerable interest in improving PDP efficiency by optimizing the cell design, input voltage characteristics, operating conditions and gas mixture. In this article, we report on a two-dimensional computer model for PDPs which has been used to investigate the operation of a coplanar-electrode PDP cell sustained in He/Ne/Xe gas mixtures. The plasma transport equations are implicitly integrated in time to enable simulation of complex gas mixtures and PDP cell designs. To resolve the details of the electron dynamics, the electron temperature is computed by solving the electron energy equation. A Monte Carlo simulation for secondary electrons and a radiation transport model for visible light emission are also employed. The basic operation of the PDP cell is described in this article. The first pulse was usually found to initiate a discharge between the top electrodes and the bottom address electrode, which was grounded. Only after a positive surface charge was formed on the bottom dielectric did the discharge shift to being between the coplanar electrodes. For our conditions, radiation from Xe-2* made a larger contribution to exciting the phosphor for visible light emission than radiation from the resonance states of Xe since radiation from Xe-2* is optically thin. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-8979(99)07107-8].