One of the clear visions of microelectronic device engineering has been to replace the thermal cathode by a "cold" emitting cathode. The main advantages of using a cold cathode are that it is smaller and consumes less energy than its thermal counterpart. For a long time the main obstacle to designing such a device was the inability of achieving a broad area low-threshold electron emission from material of interest. This study reports surprisingly broad area low-threshold emission from homoepitaxially grown N-doped chemical vapor deposited (CVD) diamond (111), which was never achieved with polycrystalline diamond. Moreover, there was a strong correlation between the oxygen absorbed site and emission site. Our results suggest a superhard, metastable planar cold cathode with a desired emission site can be obtained by homoepitaxially grown N-doped CVD diamond (111) with selective oxygen absorption. (C) 2003 American Vacuum Society.