Electrostatic analysis of field emission triode with volcano-type gate

More researchers have paid much attention to fabrication of field emission triodes with volcano-type gates on silicon substrates in recent years because of ease of fabrication and low cost. In this paper five different structures of this triode are presented. The electric field on the top of field emitter (E/sub tip/) is calculated in those structures by using EMAS software, and the different potential distributions and electric field distributions are obtained from these calculations. The results show that the diameter of the gate holes have much effect on the E/sub tip/ for this triode. Because the volcano-type gate holes fabricated by wet or dry etching have very sharp rim, when the space between the anode and the gate is small, a high electric field of more than 1/spl times/10/sup 7/ v/cm is formed on the rim of the gate hole at a given gate voltage V/sub g/ and anode voltage V/sub a/.