Technology and performance of diamond field emitters

Vacuum microelectronic devices are enjoying renewed interest because of impressive recent advances in dry etching and deposition techniques. By combining suitable subsequent processing steps it is in technological reach to produce 3D-devices not accessible otherwise. One prominent example is the Negative Electron Affinity (NEA) field emitter based on thin polycrystalline diamond films. These emitters can form large arrays which are of prime interest to next generation flat panel displays. After describing a novel fabrication sequence based on high resolution Art-ion beam etching performance data for ungated and gated diamond coated Si-field emitters with nm-size curvatures are presented. From these it is concluded that NEA-diamond field emitters indeed are very promising candidates for high performance flat panel displays.