Fabrication of self-aligned silicon field emitters coated with diamond-like carbon

One of the basic challenges of the field emission display is the choice of material for field emission cathode. Metal tips have lower resistivity, higher thermal conductivity, and better hardness than semiconductor tips, but it is difficult to apply VLSI technology and thus make a large size display using metal tips. Semiconductors are good in terms of processing, but they are not the best material for field emission tips because of high resistivity, low thermal conductivity, poor hardness, and oxidized surface. Recently, the emission behavior of diamond-like carbon (DLC) is attracting a growing effort. Since the DLC film can be grown at low temperature and has most of the material properties of diamond, it can be a good alternative to diamond field emitters. In this paper, we report the field emission properties of the DLC film coated on silicon emitter tips. We have fabricated silicon field emitters, on which we coated DLC film. We have also attached a gate to the DLC-coated emitters using a self-aligned fabrication method.