Abstract
The review reports results of experimental and theoretical study of electrical properties, especially electron emission from both sandwich (MIM cathodes) and planar (discontinuous metal films) metal-insulator-metal systems. Experimental dependencies—IV characteristics of leakage and emission current, distributions of emitted electrons before and after the forming process—are summed up. Some attention is devoted to various hypotheses about the physical processes which take part during the electron emission from sandwich and planar MIM systems.