Fabrication and field emission characteristics of a novel planar-gate electron source with patterned carbon nanotubes for backlight units

Abstract

This paper describes the fabrication of backlight units (BLUs) for a liquid crystal display (LCD) based on a novel planar-gate electron source with patterned carbon nanotubes (CNTs) formed by electrophoretic deposition. The electric field distributions and electron trajectories of this triode structure are simulated according to Ansys software. The device structure is optimized by supporting numerical simulation. The field emission results show that the emission current depends strongly on the cathode-gate gap and the gate voltage. Direct observation of the luminous images on a phosphor screen reveals that the electron beams undergo a noticeable expansion along the lateral direction with increasing gate voltage, which is in good agreement with the simulation results. The luminous efficiency and luminance of the fabricated device reaches 49.1 lm/W and 5500 cd/m 2 , respectively. All results indicate that the novel planar-gate electron source with patterned CNTs may lead to practical applications for an electron source based on a flat lamp for BLUs in LCD.

Fully 3D-printed carbon nanotube field emission electron sources with in-plane gate electrode

“…Unlike the great majority of field emission cathodes reported in literature that have an out-of-plane gate electrode on top of the field emitters, our design has an in-plane gate placed directly on top of the substrate, side-by-side with the emitting electrode, which significantly reduces the manufacturing complexity of the device and its cost, as well as facilitates high gate transmission. There are reports of field emission sources with in-plane gate [35,36]; however, they use an interdigitated layout instead of concentric spirals, and are made using conventional manufacturing processes with the disadvantages mentioned above.…”