Abstract: Voltage pulser circuits are utilized to selectively, alternately supply high voltage to, or ground the high voltage input of plasma panel driver chips. High voltage is supplied to a driver chip only when the driver chip must perform an addressing pulse. The grounding operation, which is induced by shorting the high voltage input of a driver chip to the ground input of the chip, greatly reduces the amount of power which must be dissipated in the driver chip. The use of the voltage pulser circuit also allows full slew rate control of the output pulse which the driver chips supply to the plasma panel.

Abstract: Complex waveforms used to control a plasma panel are formed as sequences of common elemental waveform modules. These modules are combined in various orders into strings capable of performing various functions on the plasma panel. Large scale parallel addressing is accomplished by forming a string of several sustain modules, followed by a write or erase module.

Abstract: A brightness control using modular waveform techniques is disclosed which enables a wide range of brightness control not affected by the order in which functions are executed. 512 cell parallel addressing is used, enabling the border electrodes to be discharged only once during each extended cycle, thus lowering the intensity of light emitted from the borders by at least a factor of 5. An erase before write technique is described which allows an erase operation to be inserted into a write function without extending the length of the write function, thus doubling the maximum data rate of the plasma panel display system.