Fabrication of Sputtered Gated Silicon Field Emitter Arrays with Low Gate Leakage Currents by Using Si Dry Etch

A volcano shaped gated Si-FEA (silicon field emitter array) was simply fabricated using sputtering as a gate electrodedeposition and lift-off for the removal of the oxide mask, respectively. Due to the limited step coverage of wellcontrolledsputtering and the high aspect ratio in Si dry etch caused by high RF power, it was possible to obtain SiFEAs with a stable volcano shaped gate structure and to realize the restriction of gate leakage current in field emissioncharacteristics. For 100 tip arrays and 625 tip arrays, gate leakage currents were restricted to less than 1% of the anodecurrent in spite of the volcano-shaped gate structure. It was also possible to keep the emitters stable without anyfailure between the Si cathode and gate electrode in field emission for a long time.