Kyocera Corporation

Tetsuji Hyodo

Koji Kato

Tsuyoshi Yasutomi

Keijiro Minami

Takuji Hashiguchi

Koichi Fukubeppu

Shinji Hirata

Kazuyuki Itaki

Atsuo Nishizono

Hideo Noguchi

Hitoshi Takao

The invention relates to a thermal head which comprises: a plurality of heating elements arranged at regular intervals on the top surface of an electrically insulating substrate; a common electrode connected to one ends of the respective heating elements; a plurality of discrete lead wires connected to the other ends of the respective heating elements and led out in directions at predetermined angles with respect to the direction of arrangement of the heating elements; and driving IC including a plurality of connecting pads arranged nearly parallel with the direction of arrangement of the heating elements and with intervals smaller than the intervals of arrangement of the heating elements, the connecting pads connected to lead-out sections of the discrete lead wires, wherein the connecting pads of the driving IC are arranged with intervals between the neighboring connecting pads which vary depending on the sine values of angles between the direction of arrangement of the heating elements and the lead-out directions of the respective discrete lead wires.

Thermal head

Disclosed is a thermal head comprising: plural heating elements, and a driving circuit element comprising plural switching elements connected individually to the heating elements, gate elements connected individually to the switching elements, and a shift register connected to the gate elements; wherein the plural heating elements are divided into plural blocks, and the gate elements of each block are connected to plural shift registers in the same number of bits as the number of heating elements of each block individually; strobe signals in the same number as the number of divisions of the block are fed into gate elements corresponding to each block; a clock gate element is provided in each block in order to obstruct clock input into the shift register corresponding to each block when printing of each block is active; and each block is further divided into plural small blocks, and the heating elements corresponding to each small block are disposed in every different block.

Thermal head and method for driving the same

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Aira, Japan

Tetsuji Hyodo