Miniature flash heated field emitter structures

Discusses the development of small heatable field emitter structures, to provide fast ´flash´ heating with low power requirements. These field emitter structures could be used in arrays of emitters or as individual miniature emitter assemblies. These concepts could find eventual use in field emission arrays, vacuum microelectronic devices, e-beam lithography, or other cold cathode applications. The advantages of these flash heatable field emitter structures (FHFS) would be to enable immediate turn-on, to increase lifetime because of the ability to clean the emitter surface, to allow for thermal/field forming, and to increase the emission stability. They would also allow for surface diffusion and equilibration of thin-film emitter coatings.