Electrical characteristics of sealed field emission diodes using sharp vertical edge structures

Abstract

This paper describes the electrical characteristics of a sealed, field emission diode which use sharp vertical edge structures. The sharp vertical edges were formed using self-aligned conformal thin film deposition techniques, while the recessed sealed vacuum cavities were formed using standard semiconductor fabrication techniques. The I-V characteristics of the diodes were obtained for a variety of devices and are similar to the Fowler-Nordheim equation. This indicates that field emission is the source of electron current for the devices. In addition, it was found that the current of the devices scales linearly with the area of the sharp vertical edges, which indicates that the sharp vertical edges are the source of electron emission.