Field emission from silicon

A field emitter serves as a cold source of electrons. It has practical applications in various fields such as field emission flat panel displays, multiple electron-beam lithography, ion propulsion/micro-thrusters, radio frequency source, information storage technology, and electronic cooling. Silicon is an attractive material for building electron field emitters. To understand the physics of electron field emission from silicon and to push technologies of making quality field emitter arrays present both opportunities and challenges. This work focuses on an experimental study of electron field emission phenomena from silicon field emitter arrays. We demonstrate electron field emission from both the conduction band and the valence band of silicon simultaneously. A two-band field emission model is presented to explain the experimental data. Theoretical predictions for valence band emission were made in the past; however there was no direct observation until now. Experimental evidence of current saturation in field emission existed in the literature. We also report the observation of current saturation in n-type silicon field emitter arrays. A simple model is presented to account for the results. We report successfully fabricating 1/,m gate-aperture silicon field emitter arrays with a turn-on voltage as low as 14 V. The gate leakage current is observed to be less than 0.01% of the total emission current. Devices show excellent emission uniformity for different sized arrays. The low turn-on voltage is attributed to the small emitter tip radius. It was achieved by isotropic etching of silicon and low temperature oxidation sharpening of the emitter tips.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Physics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Ding, Meng, 1972-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Akintunde Ibitayo (Tayo) Akinwande and Raymond Ashoori.

• Physics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8645

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8645