selective dimming method for a new highly efficient mercury-free flat fluorescent lamp (MFFL)

A highly efficient mercury-free flat fluorescent lamp (MFFL) with dielectric barrier Xe gas discharge was developed for a LCD-TV backlight source. The unit cell of the lamp has a simple structure with two main electrodes running parallel to each other and an auxiliary electrode. The adoption of the auxiliary electrode resulted in a wide, stable operating voltage margin, high luminance and efficiency. The 4 inch diagonal size lamp showed a luminous efficacy of 441m W(-1) at a luminance of 3400 cd m(-2) with Ne-Xe( 18%) gas mixture. We demonstrated that the 4 inch unit cell can be used to construct a 5 x 8 multi-structured lamp of 32 inch diagonal size for application in a large-sized LCD backlight source by a simple repeat of the unit cell. Despite the increase in size, the 32 inch lamp showed the same discharge voltage and margin of the 4 inch unit cell. Using the proposed MFFL with the auxiliary electrode as the data electrode and the subfield method, we developed a driving scheme for 2-bit areal selective dimming control of an M x N multi-cell lamp which can be operated using only one inverter.