ELECTRON-OPTICAL PROPERTIES AND ABERRATIONS OF FIELD-EMISSION MICROSOURCES

Because of the rapid development of microfabricating and micromachining semiconductor devices, the need to design a miniaturized electron beam system has drawn much attention. In this article, different types of field emission source were investigated by taking space charge effects into consideration and using the second order finite element method. Scaling down the dimensional sizes from the conventional field emission source to the field emission microsource, electron optical properties for these field emission sources have been systematically calculated, including spherical and chromatic aberrations, diameter of crossover, the probe size, and the brightness. The microelectron sources proposed in the present study possess better performances than the conventional ones and thus can be used to develop microscanning electron microscopes and microelectron beam writing/reading devices.Engineering, Electrical & ElectronicNanoscience & NanotechnologyPhysics, AppliedSCI(E)2ARTICLE2275-2801