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How Plasma Displays Work

The xenon and neon gas in a plasma display is contained in hundreds of thousands of tiny cells positioned between two plates of glass. Long electrodes are also sandwiched between the glass plates, on both sides of the cells. The address electrodes sit behind the cells, along the rear glass plate.

Transparent display electrodes, which are surrounded by an insulating dielectric material, and covered by a magnesium oxide protective layer, are mounted above the cell along the front glass plate.

Both sets of electrodes extend across the entire screen. The display electrodes are arranged in horizontal rows along the screen and the address electrodes are arranged in vertical columns. As you can see in the diagram below, the vertical and horizontal electrodes form a basic grid. For TV’s, each pixel contains 3 cells red, green, and blue as shown below.

To ionize the gas in a particular cell, the plasma display's computer charges the electrodes that intersect at that cell. It does this thousands of times in a small fraction of a second, charging each cell in turn.

When the intersecting electrodes are charged (with a voltage difference between them), an electric current flows through the gas in the cell. The current creates a rapid flow of charged particles, which stimulates the gas atoms to release ultraviolet photons as seen at the top picture in this article.