Vacuum fluorescent displays using field emission technology

Display technology in recent years is undergoing major revolutions. Display devices using field emission technology is slowly gaining momentum. The basic physics in this process is governed by the Fowler Nordheim equation. However in this particular approach the emitter has a dimension which is many orders of magnitude larger than the de-Broglie wavelength of the emitted particles. On the other hand if the size of the emitters can be reduced to nanometer scale or even lesser, the intensity of the electric field at the tip of the emitters can be increased. Keeping this particular point in view we discuss in this article, field emission display (FED) devices using carbon nano tubes (CNT). One should note that this reduction in dimension of the emitters introduce new finite size effects to the emission mechanism. In this paper we investigate some of these aspects including the density and finite size correction.