Development of high-brightness flat field-emission lamp with a special electrode system for block dimming BLUs for LCDs

A flat field-emission lamp (FFEL) has been developed that utilizes a specially designed electrode structure and an unique nanostructure carbon electron emitter called a carbon nanometer electron exit (CNX) emitter. CNX emitters have been developed on metal-wire substrates with a special plasma chemical-vapor-deposition technique. Field electron emission from CNX emitters has been investigated in a vacuum of 2×10^-4Pa by using a diode configuration with an A-K space of 1 mm, which shows that an emission current of 5.7 A/cm² can be obtained at an electrical-field strength of 2.2 V/μm. Then, the emission-current stability was also carried out to investigate the CNX-emitter lifetime. Also, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and micro-Raman spectrum was used to characterize the CNX film. Furthermore, the design of the special diode emission system was optimized by simulating the electron orbits with a commercial software, the result of which indicates that the emission system was used to effectively extract electrons from the emitter and control the local block dimming. And, also, a simple FFEL structure was used to illustrate the simulation results. Finally, a 7-in. FFEL has been successfully fabricated, demonstrating a luminance of 15,000 cd/m ²with an anode voltage of 6 kV.