FIELD EMISSION FROM AMORPHOUS CARBON THIN FILM HAVING EMBEDDED NANOPARTICLES

Abstract

At the present time, there are many aspects in our personal life that are going to be transformed by nanotechnology. Not only are computers and electronic devices getting smaller, more powerful and cheaper, but nanotechnology has also become more advanced as we can manipulate matter at the molecular and atomic level. Nanostructured materials and devices provide links between molecular and solid-state physics and eliminate some of the limitations of conventional technologies. These nanostructures have the potential for applications such as battery electrodes, gas sensing, supercapacitors and field emission display for flat-panel TVs. Hence researchers are focused on investigating and developing nanostructured materials, particularly silicon nanostructures that can be combined with the power of modern silicon integrated circuits. Emerging vacuum microelectronics devices are of much interest due to their unique properties such as high current densities, ballistic electron transport, temperature independence and radiation hardness. These properties promote a wide range of applications including field emission displays (FEDs) for flat panel monitors. Many research groups have developed field emission devices based on nanostructured material such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), nanobelts, SiC nanowires, AlN nanoneedles, Si nanowires, SnO nanowhiskers and so forth. Generally, fairly high emission current density, i.e. 10mA/cm2, is desirable to light a phosphor display. This chapter provides the outline of this thesis. It lays out the background of amorphous diamond like carbon, vacuum electronics and potential applications that has motivated this research.