Field emission devices employing diamond particle emitters

Abstract

Improved diamond particle emitters, useful for flat panel displays, are fabricated by suspending nanometer-sized ultra-fine particles in a solution, applying the suspension as a coating onto a conducting substrate such as n-type Si or metal, subjecting the coated substrate to a plasma of hydrogen, and applying a thin, conformal diamond overcoating layer onto the particles. The resulting emitters show excellent emission properties, such as extremely low turn-on voltage, good uniformity and high current densities. In particular, the electron emitters are capable of producing electron emission current densities of at least 0.1 mA/,mm.sup.2 at extremely low vacuum electric fields of 0.2-3.0 V/.mu.m V/.mu.m. These field values are about an order of magnitude lower than exhibited by the best defective CVD diamond and almost two orders of magnitude lower than p-type semiconducting diamond. It is further found that the emission characteristics remain the same even after the plasma treated diamond surface is exposed to air for several months.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.