Parasitic Emission Suppression in Arrays of Individually Addressable Silicon Microcavity Plasma Devices

Full addressability of arrays of Si microcavity plasma devices has been demonstrated by adopting a split top electrode design. Arrays of pyramidal microcavities with emitting apertures of 100 times 100 mum², a pixel pitch of 200 mum, and sizes as large as 512 times 512 pixels have been fabricated in 250-mum-thick Si(100) wafers. Parasitic capacitance is responsible for weak emission from adjacent microcavities when a single pixel is addressed but the suppression of nearest neighbor fluorescence with the current array design is ~6 dB. Any pixel in the array can be addressed with an rms voltage as low as 240 V when the array is operating in 500 torr of Ne.