Fabrication and characterization of lateral field-emitter triodes

The author fabricated a field-emitter triode with tungsten electrodes arranged laterally on a quartz glass substrate by using the photolithography and dry etching techniques. The device consists of an array of 170 field-emitter tips with a 10- mu m pitch, a columnar gate, and an anode. The emission characteristics followed the Fowler-Nordheim tunneling theory. The mutual conductance was about 0.02 mu S at an anode voltage of 300 V. The authors improved the fabrication process to obtain an emitter with an operating voltage of about 100 V.<
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