Fabrication and characterization of DLC-coated field emitter array

We fabricated diamond-like-carbon (DLC) coated knife edge field emitter array (KEFEA) on the [110] oriented silicon wafer. The fabricated KEFEA have above six hundreds times of aspect ratio. Then we coated the KEFEA with 300 /spl Aring/ thick DLC film by PECVD method. And we measured the emission current from the KEFEA under vacuum pressure of around 2/spl times/10/sup -7/ torr. The threshold voltage of the DLC-coated KEFEA lowered about 200 V compared with the bare Si KEFEA. By coating the DLC film, its emission stability was dramatically improved. A simulation on the emitter has been performed by using MAXWELL software.