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Excellent article on FED TV – FE Technologies design and production

There are many advantages to FED TV or field emission displays over plasma or LCD panels. However, they are very difficult to make. It appears that FET (Field Emission Technologies) has found a solution though.

EE Times published an excellent explanation of FED design and production last month. Please read the full story here. Excerpts are found below.

“No one has been able to mass produce FEDs as a video display due to several technical issues. Manufacturing challenges include problems related to field-emitter structures and the difficulty of attaining high vacuum levels required by FEDs.

Spindts electrodes
FE Technologies claims to have found solutions to the mass-production problem. FEDs are similar to CRTs. Instead of a single electron gun, FE Technologies’ FED uses a large array of cone-shaped electrodes, called “Spindts.” Many Spindts positioned behind each phosphor dot emit electrons through a process known as field emission.”

“A conventional Spindt device was structured by assigning one Spindt per pixel. Therefore, the size of each Spindt needed to be exactly identical, otherwise, the brightness of each pixel became uneven, lowering image quality.

The company corrected the problem by placing multiple numbers of Spindts, called Nano-Spindt Structure, per pixel, thus evening Spindt differentials.”

“Fourteen hundred Spindts are required to keep pixel brightness differentials within 2 percent,” said Hiroyuki Ikeda, general manager of marketing at FE Technologies. Using this structure, the electric current per Spindt decreased while Spindt operating lifetime was improved, the company said.

“The company said it will proceed with the mass production of FED panels using 5,000 glass substrates per month. The initial application for FE Technologies’ 26-inch FED panels will be as “master” monitors, used by TV broadcasters to check picture quality. Neither LCDs nor plasma displays are said to satisfy the high quality standard required by such master monitors.”

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