Plasma Pioneer Working on Ultra-Power-Efficient Solution for All Screen Sizes

Larry Weber, inducted into the CEA Hall of Fame last month for contributions to plasma display panel technology and its commercialization, has set his sights on the next major breakthrough for the 50-year-old technology. Weber told Consumer Electronics Daily he’s working in his garage lab in upstate New York to reduce the power use for plasma displays by as much as 20 to 40 times.

It was Weber’s energy recovery sustain circuit that cut plasma power consumption roughly by half when he developed it in 1986 at the University of Illinois and commercialized it a year later at Plasmaco, where the company made monochrome computer displays at a plant purchased from IBM in Kingston, N.Y. Later, Weber’s work in gas discharge methods led to contrast ratios high enough for use in televisions. And it was Weber who first demonstrated plasma technology for use in a 60-inch screen at the May 1999 meeting of the Society of Information Display (SID), leading the way for plasma to establish itself for many years as the de facto display technology for TVs 42 inches and above, he told us.

Now, as LCD screens have made a big dent in plasma’s big-screen territory, Weber wants to take plasma technology back to its small-screen roots. A plasma display in a laptop PC isn’t out of the question, he said, noting there’s room for power efficiency improvements that don’t exist in LCD, he said. “If we can get a factor of 20 power reduction in plasma,” he said, “then plasma will take a lot less power than LCD.”

Weber’s interest in furthering the efficiency of plasma TV is multi-faceted. His passion and involvement with the development of plasma displays dates to the 1960s when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois working with plasma’s creators. He was also behind the international movement to establish standards for TV power and was the architect of IEC 62087, an international standard that specifies methods of measurement for the power consumption of television sets, he said. And now, finding a way to make plasma more energy efficient is about perpetuation of the display he helped create.

Weber noted that every two years organizations like the European Union and EPA reduce the maximum power usage TVs can have and still retain Energy Star ratings. The TV industry has been responding to those requirements, but he doesn’t know how much further it can go. “They'll keep putting the screws to the industry, and I'm a little afraid they'll scare some of the industry away,” he said. “You can’t squeeze too much blood from a turnip,” he added, noting that today’s plasma TVs use less power than a 100-watt incandescent bulb. He observed wryly that the DOE has put the 100-watt light bulb on notice, too.

Weber believes plasma can be competitive in the small-screen space price-wise and in energy consumption. OLED is still far too expensive, he said, and LCD engineers have wrung all they can out of transmission efficiency. They've moved on to energy-efficient LED bulbs to replace fluorescents, local dimming and lower brightness settings that affect the entire picture. Fluorescent bulbs are still the primary light source for LCDs, but, when fully open, an LCD “only transmits 5 percent of the light,” he said. He called that design a “stagnant characteristic” of LCD for the past 10 years. Polarizers “throw away” 50 percent or more of the light and color filters throw away a factor of three more, he said, resulting in additional energy waste.

The problem facing plasma efficiency today “is in the gas discharge,” not in the phosphors or electronics, Weber said. “I need to make a gas discharge that’s very efficient,” he said, saying he understands why gas discharge with small displays is “not very efficient” and why the big display is. “I'm trying to come up with the necessary invention that’s practical enough to get the job done,” he said. Weber is funding the work and doing it along with a Ph.D. assistant. His hope is to solve the technical hurdles and “right now I'm very excited about the ideas.” The answer will require a “whole chain of solutions,” and his strategy is to come up with the practical set of solutions, patent the ideas and then sell the intellectual property to major TV companies. “It’s something I have a little experience with,” he said, citing the multi-decade path that led to Plasmaco’s sale to Panasonic in 1996.

Assuming his strategy plays out, next-gen plasma panels will be used in displays large and small, he said. “Once you have a display technology that takes very little power, that can be bright and manufactured at a low price, it can be used anywhere,” he said.