Fabrication and characteristics of double-gate zinc oxide nanowire field emitter arrays

Large area addressable zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowire field emitter arrays (FEAs) have important applications in vacuum microelectronic devices such as flat panel x-ray sources. However, further work on increasing the performance of gated ZnO nanowire FEAs is needed. In this work, we propose double-gate ZnO nanowire FEAs. Simulation results show that the double-gate structure can realize higher gate modulation capability compared with the single-gate structure. Double-gate ZnO nanowire FEAs have been fabricated, and their performance has been studied. The maximum emission current density (3.32 mA/cm(2)) and transconductance (2433 nS) obtained in this work are higher than the previously reported ZnO nanowire FEAs. The results verify that double-gate ZnO nanowire FEAs are promising for applications in large area vacuum microelectronic devices.