Improvement of Lighting Uniformity in Field Emission Display with Carbon Nano-Tube Cathodes

Lighting tubes using CNT printed cathodes for large-scale flat displays were fabricated and their fundamental characteristics such as brightness, drive voltage vs emission current under various types of CNT surface treatment, emission life and adjacent leakage of light are described. The brightness of 3000 cd/m(2) was obtained with a 10 kV anode voltage and a 0.5 mA anode current. Though there are many CNTs, which are not aligned vertically to the gate electrode, in the cathodes, uniformity of pixel light is not sufficient and filamentary concentration of light is observed. We provided a shield electrode with special mesh aperture between the gate electrodes and an anode in order to improve the uniformity of light. As a result, we can obtain nearly uniform pixel light with a much lower shield electrode voltage than the gate electrodes.