Abstract Over the past decade, the reported planar vacuum electron tubes (VETs) have not yet succeeded in resolving the gate leakage issue due to inherent limitations of their working principles, preventing their circuit integration thus far. This paper proposes a cathode modulated vacuum/air channel electron tube (CMVET), which completely solves the long-standing gate leakage problem. Furthermore, the developed CMVET has been integrated into fundamental circuit blocks and successfully applied in common-source amplifiers, differential amplifiers, cascode amplifiers, as well as NOR and NAND gates, thereby demonstrating its functionality and laying a foundation for further research on monolithic electron tube integrated circuits.
YING et al. (Mon,) studied this question.