Fabrication of low gate current triode field emitters with planar carbon nanoparticle cathodes

We modified the structure of the triode field emitters with planar carbon nanoparticle cathodes to reduce the gate currents. As it turned out a simple insertion of an extra metal layer between the gate insulator and the cathode layer was sufficient for the substantial reduction of gate currents; the gate currents of the triode emitter with the modified structure never exceeded 4% of the anode currents up to the anode currents of /spl sim/250 nA corresponding to the gate voltage of 67 V and the anode voltage 900 V. The fabrication of the modified triode structure required only two extra processing steps together with the conventional photolithography. We were able to account for the gate-current reduction in terms of the modification in the electric field distribution.