Fabrication and characterization of gated porous silicon cathode field emission arrays

Gated porous silicon cathode field emission arrays have been fabricated. The devices were fabricated by using a simple self-aligning gate process which results in reproducible physical characteristics across the entire array. In addition, an anodization process has been developed to form porous silicon in a localized region on the substrate. The resulting device structure consists of a conical porous silicon tip that is self-aligned with respect to a concentric metal gate electrode. Small arrays exhibited Fowler–Nordheim characteristics over several decades of anode current. The porous silicon tip has been shown to produce a large submicroscopic field enhancement which leads to an improvement in emission characteristics.