Study on High Efficiency EEFL Backlight inverter for 32-inch LCD TV

As the screen size of LCD increases, EEFL(External Electrode Fluorescent Lamp) has been suggested to be applicable as backlight source for LCD . Since the electrodes of EEFL are outside of the tube, EEFL enhances the lifetime compared with CCFL(Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp), and a single inverter can drive multiple EEFL tubes of which luminance is uniform Therefore, a compact design can be realized and the cost of EEFL application would be much lower than that of CCFL. Moreover, EEFL inverter has higher efficiency per unit power than CCFL inverter. In this paper, a complementary full-bridge PWM(Pulse Width Modulation) inverter was designed for 32-inch LCD TV backlight which has 20 EEFL tubes and adapted two different driving methods to the EEFL inverter. The validity of this study is confirmed from the experimental results.