Fabrication of vertically aligned Si nanowires and their application in a gated field emission device

A technique involving a combination of using self-assembled nanomask and anisotropic plasma etching is developed for fabricating vertically aligned single-crystalline Si nanowires (SiNWs). The SiNWs are shown to have excellent field emission performance with the turn-on field as low as 0.8MV∕m and the threshold field being 5.0MV∕m. In addition, an emission current density of 442mA∕cm2 can be obtained at an applied field of ∼14MV∕m. The technique is easily employed to fabricate arrays of SiNW-based field emission microtriodes. Mechanisms are proposed to explain the formation of the SiNWs and the observed field emission properties.