A low temperature fabrication process for gated held emitter arrays is developed with etched amorphous silicon microtips on glass substrates. Reactive ion etching using a SF6/O-2 plasma is employed to sharpen microtips without any thermal oxidation or wet etching technique. Field emitter arrays with a triode structure are successively fabricated by utilizing plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition and electron beam evaporation for a SiO2 gate oxide and a niobium gate, respectively.