A new approach to manufacturing field emitter arrays with submicron gate apertures

The field emitter arrays with submicron gate apertures have been successfully fabricated by local oxidation of silicon (LOCOS) to overcome the limitation of performance of the conventional optical photolithography tool. The gate hole diameter of 0.55 /spl mu/m has been obtained by reducing 1 /spl mu/m from the original mask pattern size. The anode current of 0.1 /spl mu/A per emitter is measured at the gate voltage of about 53 V, while the gate current is less than 0.3% of the anode current. To obtain the same current level from a Spindt-type emitter with the same gate diameter as the mask pattern size, a gate bias of about 82 V is needed.