Development of dry-processed silicon nano-dot planar cold cathode and its electron emission properties

Planar-type porous silicon cold cathodes have some specific properties: the emission of energetic electrons with small angle dispersion and the availability for various media including solutions. The nanocrystalline silicon dot chain incorporated into porous silicon plays an important role as a drift layer generating quasi-ballistic electrons. The porous silicon drift layer is usually formed using wet processing: anodization of singleor polycrystalline silicon in HF solutions. Employment of dry-processing for fabricating Si-nanodot film would make it easier to integrate the emitter array into its driving circuit. In this work, we have developed dry-processed planar-type cold cathodes in which a multilayered Si-nanodots film acts as the drift layer and investigated the relationship between the multilayered Si-nanodots structure and the electron emission characteristics.