Fabrications of Spindt-type cathodes with aligned carbon nanotube emitters

In this paper, we present a technique for fabricating carbon nanotubes (CNTs) field emission arrays in an integrated gate structure. Two kinds of such Spindt-type cathodes with vertically aligned carbon nanotubes emitters were fabricated. One process involved direct growth of CNTs from the bottom of micro-sized cells and the other process was to grow CNTs on pre-deposited Mo tips in Spindt-type arrays. The former had fairly good, consistent emitters with a number of CNTs self-“shaped” in a tip-like form, whereas the latter showed that the emitters comprised only a few or single CNTs on Mo tips. Preliminary current-voltage measurements of a 20 × 20 array with CNTs grown from the bottom of each cell showed an onset voltage of ∼30 V with a relatively large gate leakage current.