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One of the clear visions of microelectronic device engineering has been to replace the thermal cathode by a ''cold'' emitting cathode. The main advantages of using a cold cathode are that it is smaller and consumes less energy than its thermal counterpart. For a long time the main obstacle to designing such a device was the inability of achieving a broad area low-threshold electron emission from material of interest. This study reports surprisingly broad area low-threshold emission from homoepitaxially grown N-doped chemical vapor deposited ͑CVD͒ diamond ͑111͒, which was never achieved with polycrystalline diamond. Moreover, there was a strong correlation between the oxygen absorbed site and emission site. Our results suggest a superhard, metastable planar cold cathode with a desired emission site can be obtained by homoepitaxially grown N-doped CVD diamond ͑111͒ with selective oxygen absorption.

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Articles you may be interested inBroad area electron emission from oxygen absorbed homoepitaxially grown nitrogen (N)-doped chemical vapor deposited diamond (111) surface J.Comparison of the effect of boron and nitrogen incorporation on the nucleation behavior and electron-fieldemission properties of chemical-vapor-deposited diamond films Heavily nitrogen ͑N͒-doped polycrystalline diamond was reported to have excellent electron emission properties. One of the obstacles to practical application of this diamond was its localized and uncontrolled electron emission site. Even though we have reported the broad area electron emission from homoepitaxial diamond in our previous work, the difficulty remained to fabricate the injection contact for homoepitaxial diamond because its substrate is an insulator, which is not suitable for practical applications. In this study, we have obtained heavily N-doped heteroepitaxial diamond films on Iridium ͑Ir͒, and its electron emission properties are investigated. It is found that the emission threshold voltage of heteroepitaxial diamond ͑100͒ is higher than that of other heavily N-doped diamonds and has linear relationship between the spacing as is not observed in metalinsulator-vacuum type emission, which is a model proposed for electron emission from polycrystalline and homoepitaxial diamonds. From the characterization results, obtained film is confirmed to be identical to heavily N-doped polycrystalline and homoepitaxial diamond. The difference in the emission properties, thus, is caused by high electron affinity of diamond ͑100͒ and the absence of negative charges at the Ir/diamond interface.