Patterned growth of carbon nanotube array for field emission application

A fabrication strategy is proposed to achieve patterned growth of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs) on silicon substrate. Chemical vapor deposition with carbon source from Iron Phthalocyanine pyrolysis is a simple and straight forward way to synthesize well-aligned carbon nanotube array. However, the carbon source and catalyst particles are introduced simultaneously, a selective deposition is a big challenge. A photo resistor layer is successfully adopted to stop the growth of carbon nanotube. An in-situ patterned growth of CNTs on silicon has been achieved by simple photo lithography technique. The patterned CNT array has shown good field emission property.