No abstract

Field emitter arrays of very sharp silicon tips have been fabricated using wet chemical etching technique. High depthto-width ratio silicon tips have been also fabricated using the semi-anisotropic dry etching technique. After the oxidation sharpening process, uniformly sharp emitter tips has been achieved. A new self-aligned process to fabricate the gated emitter arrays has been successfully developed. By this method, the tip radius is about 25 nm, and the gate aperture diameters can be easily reduced to 1.2 pm and even more. This will largely decrease the turn-on voltage of the field enission devices.