Incorporating consumer-priced field-emitting inks into arrays of triode devices

We report the successful fabrication and testing of several 8 x I pixel tes t devices and several 32 x 32 pixel demonstrator devices consisting of spun -coated field electron emitting cathodes as an integral part of an addressa ble triode structure. The ink-based material is a vacuum compatible composi te that can be inexpensively applied to large area glass substrates and enc apsulated using conventional vacuum baking and sealing processes. In additi on, improvements to our ink formulations have lowered the threshold fields of the composite and enabled devices to operate with a gate voltage swing o f 40 V with anode potentials in the range of 500-3000 V. Our first devices consisted of similar to1 mm(2) centred pixels capable of emitting similar t o 20 muA of current from a sub array of -10 mum diameter gated apertures. H aving now demonstrated the ability to switch pixel-sized elements in a trio de array, broad-area consumer-priced high-information-density displays are a step closer to reality. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserve d.