Design of a Plasma Flat Panel Large Screen Display for High Volume Manufacture
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Design of a plasma flat panel large screen display for high volume manufacture P. PLESHKO, N. APPERLEY, L.L. ZIMMERMAN, K.A. PEARSON, T.A. SHERK, E.J. St. PIERRE, B. HAIRABEDIAN, F. BRADNEY, R.L.J. FOSTER This paper describes the evolution of the IBM 581 a c plasma panel display. A general overview of plasma technology and the requirement for a large screen display is followed by a description of the 581 hardware architecture. Considerations which must be met for a successful high yield, high volume fabrication process are covered and the manufacturing process itself is outlined. Test results are given which show the plasma panel to operate reliably for over 350 000 hours. Changes which occur to the panel during operation are described. Finally, the presentation and updating of data displayed on the IBM 3290 terminal, which uses the 581 display, are discussed which take account of the special properties of the a c plasma display. Keywords : display devices (computers); graphic displays; a c plasma panels; large screens; design. Since IBM introduced its first high volume, alphanumeric is the case for refresh display devices, but is limited only by display product in 1966, the predominant display tech- manufacturability considerations. nology has been the cathode ray tube (CRT). The CRT is still predominant throughout the industry. When flat panel Certain aspects of technology development were necessary matrix display technologies started to be developed many in developing this high information content, matrix- expected this compact type of device to revolutionize the addressed, flat panel display to satisfy manufacturability packaging and appearance of display terminals. So far this and quality requirements. For example, large information has only happened to a limited extent. Although CRTs content matrix displays require long conductor lengths. On continue to predominate, there are now several matrix- our product, the conductor length on the two plates is addressed technologies in use: liquid crystals, light-emitting 360 m per plate. With this large amount of wire length, diodes, vacuum fluorescent displays, ac and dc plasmas and defect densities relating to conductor yield had to be to a lesser degree ac and dc electroluminescent panels. improved. This was done by improving the method of metal deposition and photo-printing of the conductor pattern and Development effort in plasma displays at IBM led in 1974 repair of open and shorted lines. To reduce the interaction to the manufacture of 22, 120,240, 480 and 1024 character of the dielectric reflow process with the metallurgy and to displays for use in the company's products. This level of improve yields, a lower temperature dielectric glass was technology marks a well understood generation from developed together with an accompanying lower tempera- engineering, manufacturing and reliability points of view 1 . ture glass seal material. This paper describes IBM's more recent ac plasma display To achieve a high quality display, a new spacer technology technology, which was developed from that base to provide was developed which doos not interfere with the operation a large screen, multiple image-format capability. The use of of adjacent cells and has a minimal effect on reducing panel higher information content displays is advantageous for margins. To achieve low failure rates for the panel and applications requiring the scanning of multiple pages of electronics, testing and pre-ageing are employed to reduce reference material and for cross-referencing multiple pages the early life failures and provide a quality control on the or frames of stored information. product. The ac plasma display technology described is a memory The paragraphs that follow discuss in more detail those technology. Because of this characteristic, the maximum subjects mentioned above. They should give the reader a size or maximum information content of the screen is not general understanding of the design and manufacturing limited by the device's luminance-voltage characteristic as considerations involved in producing this first high-volume- manufactured, flat-panel large-screen display. The authors are at IBM Corporation, Kingston, NY 12401, USA, except N. Apperley and R.L.J. Foster who are at the IBM United LARGE SCREEN DISPLAY OVERVIEW Kingdom Laboratories Ltd, Hursley Park, Winchester, Hants SO21 2JN, UK, and E.J. St. Pierre who is at IBM Corporation, The primary objective in developing a large screen terminal Poughkeepsie, NY 12601, USA. was to provide an interactive display with a large data DISPLAYS. JANUARY 1984 0141-9382/84/050021-11 $03.00 © 1984 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd 21 capacity, as well as with functions that fully exploit the area into up to four predefined screen segments. The advantages of displaying a large number of characters. This partition's origin coordinate can be any pixel on the panel. display had to be compatible with the existing family of Each segment is a fully interactive screen, typically with a IBM displays and offer increased functionwithout modifi- character capacity of a 3278 display. These are fully cation to existing application software programs. independent and communicate with different application programs which, with suitable networking, can be running The plasma panel was selected for this display technology. on different hosts. This offers a large viewing area with extremely good defini- tion that is consistent over the entire display surface. The An advanced function has been implemented to divide the design of the package exploited the flatness of the plasma display area into multiple partitions, each appearing as a display panel technology giving a depth of less than 280 mm. mini screen to the operator, but under the control of a This allows more effective use of the operator workspace single application program. In order to allow the application than is possible with CRT technology (Fig. 1). to optimize the layout, each partition can be any rectangular size and can display characters in either of two sizes with The maximum number of characters that can normally be multiple spacing options. The multiple partition function displayed on the plasma panel is 9 920, or 160 columns has been designed so that the operator can keystroke into and 60 rows in a single large page. For example, a report one partition while data is being transmitted between the retrieval application may require that a printer page of host and another partition. This permits more efficient use 132 columns by 60 rows be displayed. The terminal can of the data transmission system. also be customized to display multiple smaller screen sizes. The ac plasma display can also operate simply as a single The major differences between this terminal and other screen to support applications written for existing terminals. displays supported by the same controller (IBM 3274) are: As the entire display area is then filled by typically only 1 920 characters, the terminal microcode is designed to 1. A large character buffer because of the display capacity; select the larger of the two available character sizes and to 2. More controls than a CRT because plasma panel tech- optimize the spacing for the best human factors considera- nology is non-refreshed. The update of an individual or tions. line of characters involves the selection of the plasma driver for those character positions to erase the current New functions have been designed into the terminal to allow contents. The new character matrices are then displayed the operator to gain efficiency without change to existing by selecting the appropriate panel driver and ionizing the application programs. One is a multiple copy function which plasma at the driver intersections. This is more complex divides the screen into an interactive area, with which than controlling the traditional refresh of a CRT from a programs can communicate, and up to three copy areas, character buffer and character generator, but does permit each containing the same number of characters as an IBM greater flexibility; and 3278 terminal. The copy areas are designed to save and 3. Increased function. display the contents of the interactive area for future reference while the operator continues with the application These differences demanded a new split of function between in the interactive area. the controller and the terminal in order to optimize perfor- mance. It was a requirement that the same controller A multiple interactive screen function divides the display support existing devices with an unchanged interface. For the new displays, the 3274 controls the transmission line discipline to the host and performs a multiplexing function to the terminal. HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE The opportunities promised by a large, general purpose plasma display panel were attended by problems peculiar to the new size and expanded usage of such a panel. Existing panel data handling techniques were too slow for the twenty-fold increase in pixel count over that of previously available IBM plasma display panels. Neither did the old, alphanumeric-only methods apply well to the new applica- tion line-up. The large, all-points-addressable screen format invited graphics and non-coded image display, the data for which is not organized into characterized spaces. An archi- tecture of the panel-driving logic was developed to yield a user interface allowing adequate performance, and which would be general enough to be incorporated easily into any display product. Logic architecture Logic architecture defines the functions performed in the subsystem, the interface lines by which these functions are evoked, and the resulting display size and performance. A Fig. 1 The IBM 3290 a c plasma display panel display subsystem is a device which incorporates the basic 22 DISPLAYS. JANUARY 1984 character generator ROM. Additional inputs to the ROM define which line of the character is being written. The out- I Vertical put byte from the character generator is serialized to modu- drivers late one pixel at a time as positioning is synchronously changed.