Current Trends in Field Emission Displays

Vacuum nanoelectronics has been expected to provide a number of advanced devices such as flat panel displays, high- frequency devices and so on. Especially, field emission displays (FEDs) including Surface-conduction electron-emitter displays (SEDs) have been showing tremendous progress and become attractive nanoelectronic technology for a new generation of flat panel displays. Nowadays, nanomachining and nanomaterials are coming to new targets in the development for new generation devices. However, there are important limitations of their reliability and efficiency in FEDs and SEDs, mainly attributed to the emitters. The Transfer Mold emitters, the carbon nanotube emitters, the Si nano crystalline emitters, and the surface conduction electron emitters (SCEs) have been the candidates for getting and controlling the emitter structures. Also, recently, field emission lamps (FELs) have become new research target as promising mercury-free fluorescent lamps. In this paper, the recent progress and the technical issues on FEDs and FELs are overviewed.