SiOx Tunneling Diode Arrays With Uniform Electron Emission

• Published in: IEEE electron device letters Vol. 43; no. 8; pp. 1339 - 1342
• Main Authors: Zhan, Fangyuan, Yang, Wei, Li, Zhiwei, He, Yidan, Yu, Panpan, Wang, Bingjie, Wei, Xianlong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.08.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Arrays; Electroforming; Electron emission; Emitters; Graphene; Light emission; micro-emitter array; Nanoscale devices; On-chip electron source; Optical arrays; Optical imaging; Silicon; silicon oxide; Spatial distribution; Stimulated emission; Tunnel diodes; Tunneling; tunneling diode; uniform emission
• DOI: 10.1109/LED.2022.3184948
• ISSN: 0741-3106

Uniform electron emission (EE) from on-chip micro-emitter arrays based on SiO x tunneling diodes (STDs) in electroformed SiO x is reported. EE from STDs is found to be accompanied with visible light emission, which enables us to resolve the spatial distribution of EE from the micro-emitter arrays and emitter-to-emitter uniformity at the microscale resolution via optical imaging. Up to 99% micro-emitters in a 15 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\times15 </tex-math></inline-formula> array is observed to work simultaneously with good emitter-to-emitter uniformity, showing an emission current of 0.56 mA and an emission density of 626 mA/cm 2 . The good uniformity is attributed to the insensitivity of EE from STDs to the microfabricated structures of micro-emitters.