Surface-conduction electron-emitter display

At one end of the gun, electrons are produced by "boiling" them off a metal filament, which requires relatively high currents and consumes a large proportion of the CRT's power.

When viewed from a distance, the spots, known as "sub-pixels," blend together in the eye to produce a single picture element known as a pixel.

The SED replaces the single gun of a conventional CRT with a grid of nanoscopic emitters, one for each sub-pixel of the display.

Due to the nanoscopic size of the slits, the required field can correspond to a potential on the order of tens of volts.

The quantum tunneling effect, which emits electrons across the slits, is highly non-linear, and the emission process tends to be fully on or off for any given voltage.

[3] SED screens consist of two glass sheets separated by a few millimeters, the rear layer supporting the emitters and the front the phosphors.

In the SED, this layer also serves as the front electrode that accelerates the electrons toward the screen, held at a constant high voltage relative to the switching grid.

Next, square pads of palladium oxide (PdO) only 20 nanometers thick are deposited into the gaps between the electrodes, connecting them to supply power.

The pads are deposited with a much larger gap between them, as much as 50 nm, which allows them to be added directly using technology adapted from inkjet printers.

Carbon in the gas is pulled onto the edges of the slit in the PdO squares, forming thin films that extend vertically off the tops of the gaps and grow toward each other at a slight angle.

Since the screen needs to be held in a vacuum to work, there is a large inward force on the glass surfaces due to the surrounding atmospheric pressure.

[5] Their early research used PdO electrodes without the carbon films on top, but controlling the slit width proved difficult.

At the time there were a number of flat-screen technologies in early development, and the only one close to commercialization was the plasma display panel (PDP), which had numerous disadvantages – manufacturing cost and energy use among them.

[9] Applied Nanotech, a subsidiary of Nano-Proprietary, holds a number of patents related to FED and SED manufacturing.

They had sold Canon a perpetual license for a coating technology used in their newer carbon-based emitter structure.

[11] They also started re-working their existing RE40,062 patent filing in order to remove any of Applied Nanotech's technologies from their system.

[17] In April 2009 during NAB 2009, Peter Putman was quoted as saying "I was asked on more than one occasion about the chances of Canon's SED making a comeback, something I would not have bet money on after the Nano Technologies licensing debacle.

Indeed, a Canon SED engineer from Japan was quietly making the rounds in the Las Vegas Convention Center to scope out the competition.