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How it works?
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What is Flat-Panel plasma display technology?
By definition, Plasma is a state of matter where atoms are ionized by adding energy. In a plasma video display, electricity is used to illuminate a gas stored in miniature cells coated with phosphor.
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Cross-sectional view of a plasma flat-panel display |
These small cells form the picture elements or pixels, of the display panel, and can be thought of an array of miniature colored fluorescent tubes or neon light bulbs.
Plasma flat-panel displays consist of hundreds of thousands of such tiny cells that are positioned between two plates of glass. These cells are filled with neon xenon gas.
Simple mathematics show that a typical wide screen panel with a screen resolution of 1365 x 768 pixels would have over 1-million miniature cells.
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'Three' sub-cell structure of a plasma display pixel |
Each of these cells is further sub-divided into three sub-cells as will be explained further on, each representing one of the primary light colors (click on image for more details).
Sandwiched between the glass plates are long electrodes on both sides of the cells. The address electrodes sit behind the cells along with the rear glass plate while transparent display electrodes sit in front of the cells covered by a protective layer along the front glass plate.
When a voltage is applied between the display electrode and the respective address electrode, an electric current flows through the gas in the cell - simulating the gas atoms to release ultraviolet photons. This ultraviolet radiation excites the phosphor lining on the inside wall of the cell - giving off energy in the form visible light.
The phosphors in a plasma display are arranged to give off colored light - red, green or blue - to build a color image. As already indicated earlier on, each picture element in a display panel is made up of three sub-pixels - each acting as a miniature light source for one for each of these primary light colors.
Each of these miniature colored light sources blend together to create the final color of the pixel - similar in principle to the way a color CRT builds a color image on the screen. Each of these sub-pixels is energized thousands of times in a fraction of a second to eventually build the final image.
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Last updated on: |
14th October 2005 |
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