Electrostatic design for hop & flue plates

The problems of limiting the voltage applied to the anode and the charging of the insulating spacers that causes surface flashover in field emission displays (FED) are solved using resistive coatings to bleed any generated charge. Low secondary electron emission coatings are also used on discrete insulating spacer components. The use of hop plate in conjunction with flue plate are adopted resulting to hop/flue structure that can act as a spacer within the FED. Hop plate dramatically improves intrapixel uniformity and pixel definition. It also screens the cathode from the anode field and places it in a low field, low stored-energy environment. Optical activity, correlated with the pre-breakdown electric currents that flowed across the surface of the insulators, is found to be related to a localised cathode triple junction. Modelling the structures describe the appearance of doughnut shaped emission patterns at the anode which disappear at higher anode voltages.