Study of vacuum-sealed carbon nanotube field emission display using vacuum micro electron source based on planar gate structure

Field emission display (FED) is one of the most important applications of carbon nanotube (CNT) [1,2]. FEDs using screen printed and directly grown CNTs have been reported[3,4]. Screen printing is a good method to achieve large scale fabrication but difficult to fabricate high resolution device. While for directly grown CNT, it has been demonstrated that CNTs can been patterned in gated structure with high precision[5]. FED device with high resolution and low driving voltage has been fabricated. For example, Motorola Inc. has demonstrated its full color planar gate FED with directly grown CNTs[4]. The device had comparable resolution with full high definition TV and low driving voltage of about 100 V. However, for FED with directly grown CNTs, there are still some issues, e.g. the CNTs are liable to short with gate electrode. In this paper, we reported the fabrication of a planar gate FED. In this structure, the CNTs are confined by insulated layer which helps to reduce the possibility of shorting between CNTs and gate electrodes.