I've been doing a lot of research lately about plasma display panels for a paper I am writing. In a document about manufacturing costs I came across the following quote: "Yields will tend to improve over time. As with any manufactured product, the experience of manufacturing will lead to increased yields
until an asymptotic limit of about 80% is achieved."

OK, I'm not exactly sure what they mean by yields. From what I've heard and been reading, one of the problems with the manufacturing process (and the reason why these things are so expensive) is that the glass has to be heated several times causing imperfections and making that panel garbage.

With that in mind, does an 80% yield mean that 80% of the panels are sell-able - i.e. without defects. So if current yields are only around 30% then 70% of plasma display panels manufactured today are garbage!!??

What I take from this is by using the word asymptotic they are basically setting a goal of 80% which would represent (on a graph) a straight line for manufacture quality. The other line would be a curve that over time would gradually get closer to that 80% line. Both lines represent a specific yield so I think you are correct in your assuption that the yield is the amount of "sell-able" displays and obviously you would have a 20% defect rate. Now that is a high number! In your research are you going to include anything regarding picture quality? The reason I ask is I don't particularly find the quality very good when it comes to rendering colors. Also just as a side note you may want to look into the new displays being engineered by IBM. They are doing something new regarding plasma/lcd that is revolutionary, unfortunately I don't have any othe info on it, just a suggestion.

Thanks - although my problem is not with the word asymptotic. I wanted to make sure that I was correctly interpreting the word 'yield.' According to the data I have, today's yield is only around 30% meaning that 70% of manufactured plasmas are unfit for consumer use. That just seems like an amazingly high number, and I just wanted to know if anyone could confirm that.

Based on the quote you provided, I think your interpretationis correct. What it appears to be saying is that currently the manufacutring only yields 30% sellable product. Over time, as the manufacturing gets perfected and technology becomes more advanced, this should reach 80%, at which point it will probably level out.
Based on the price of a plasma display, and their relative scarcity, I would imagine that the 30% quote is true, as unbelievable as it is.