Fabrication of double‐gated Si field emitter arrays for focused electron beam generation

Double‐gated Si field emitter arrays (FEAs) capable of generating focused electron beams were fabricated and experimentally evaluated. The present field emitter array has a vertical triode structure consisting of a conical Si tip and two gate openings (upper and lower) surrounding the tip. The lower gate with a 2‐μm‐diam opening acts as an extraction electrode controlling the emission current, and the upper one with a 3‐μm‐diam opening acts as an electrostatic lens focusing the electron trajectories. The focusing property was evaluated by observing the spot size of a phosphor (ZnO:Zn) screen located about 20 mm apart from the field emitter array and biased to 1 kV. It was found from experimental results that decreasing the upper gate voltage (VF) down to a few volts was quite effective to generate focused electron beams. At VF of about 4 V, the electrons emitted from the tip were well collimated and a beam current of about 0.1 nA/tip was obtained.