1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a plasma display panel (PDP), and more particularly, to a PDP capable of improving the electrode structure to increase the brightness and of stabilizing charge.
2. Description of the Related Art
A PDP is a display in which discharge cells and a pair of sustaining electrodes provided so as to correspond to each discharge cell are arranged between a pair of substrates, and phosphors corresponding colors including R (red), G (green), and B (blue) are excited with ultraviolet rays generated in the process of plasma discharge to display images.
Typically, a display electrode is composed of a transparent electrode so as not to intercept light radiated from the substrate. However, since the transparent electrode itself has the high resistance, the display electrode is formed with composition of a metallic electrode and the transparent electrode in order to complement conductivity.
In this case, the transparent electrode is formed of a material, such as an ITO (indium tin oxide) or SnO2, and the metallic electrode is formed of a thin film made of Ag, a thin film consisting of three layers of Cr/Cu/Cr, and a thin film consisting of two layers of Al/Cr.
The metallic electrode is typically formed on a glass substrate by a photo etching method and a liftoff method, and then the transparent electrode is formed by the photo etching method and the liftoff method.
As such, according to the conventional approach the work process is very complicated and thus, the cost of manufacturing the panel increases. Further, since the transparent electrode is expensive, this also increases the manufacturing cost.
For this reason, in recent years efforts have been to form the display electrode with only the metallic electrode without using the transparent electrode. As one example of such a display electrode approach, a plasma display panel is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,522,072. While manufacturing cost can be reduced as compared to the above-mentioned structure of the electrode, there is still a problem in that the display electrode formed with only the metal electrode lowers the opening ratio of the panel, which decreases the brightness.
As an alternative to solve the above-mentioned problems, a method has been considered in which it makes a distance between two metals located with the discharge gap interposed therebetween increase. However, according to such a method, there are still problems in that the discharge voltage increases and the discharge becomes unstable.