Indium gallium nitride/gallium nitride vacuum microelectronic cold cathodes: Piezoelectric surface barrier lowering

Vacuum microelectronic devices are electronic devices fabricated using microelectronic processing and using vacuum as a transport medium. The electron velocity in vacuum can be larger than in solid state, which allows higher frequency operation of vacuum devices compared to solid-state devices. The effectiveness of vacuum microelectronic devices relies on the realization of an efficient source of electrons supplied to the vacuum. Cold cathodes do not rely on thermal energy for the emission of electrons into vacuum. Cold cathodes based on field emission are the most common types of vacuum microelectronic cold cathode because they have a very high efficiency and high current density electron emission. Materials used to fabricate field emitters must have the properties of high electron concentration, low surface reactivity, resistance to sputtering by ions, high thermal conductivity, and a method of fabrication of uniform arrays of field emitters. The III--V nitride semiconductors possess these material properties and uniform arrays of GaN field emitter pyramids have been produced by selective area, self-limited metalorganic chemical vapor deposition.;The first GaN field emitter arrays were fabricated and measured. Emission currents as large as 82 muA at 1100 V from 245,000 pyramids have been realized using an external anode, separated by 0.25 mm, to apply voltage bias. The operation voltage was reduced by the development of an integrated anode structure. The anode-cathode separation achievable with the integrated anode was in the range of 0.5--2.4 m. The turn-on voltages of these devices were reduced to the range of 175--435 V.;The operation voltage of field emitter cathodes is related to the surface energy barrier, which for n-type semiconductors is the electron affinity. A new method to reduce the effective electron affinity using a piezoelectric dipole in an InGaN/GaN heterostructure has been proposed and tested. The piezoelectric field produced in the strained InGaN layer on a GaN pyramid produces a dipole that counteracts the surface barrier. The reduced barrier is characterized by defining an effective electron affinity. Emission results of InGaN/GaN field emitter arrays have shown a reduced electron affinity as low as 1.0 eV when compared to the electron affinity of GaN (3.5eV).