Overheating while enabling a full flexibility in the display usage should be avoided. This object is solved by a method for avoiding the overheating of a driver circuit in a plasma display panel wherein the driver circuit receives serially display data in form of a sequence of sub-field data bits and forwards parallelly the display data in the form of data blocks each consisting of a predefined number of sub-field data bits, the method comprising the steps of counting sub-field data bits the value of which differs from that of a neighboring or preceding sub-field data bit and providing a respective counting signal indicative of heat contributions of sub-field data bits and, if said counting signal is above a pregiven threshold, taking countermeasures for reducing said temperature.