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The Solar X-ray Imager (SXI) was launched 23 July 2001 on NOAA's GOES-12 satellite and completed post-launch testing 20 December 2001. Beginning 22 January 2003 it has provided nearly uninterrupted, full-disk, soft X-ray solar images, with a continuous frame rate significantly exceeding that for previous similar instruments. The SXI provides images with a 1 min cadence and a single-image (adjustable) dynamic range near 100. A set of metallic thin-film filters provides temperature discrimination in the 0.6 -6.0 nm bandpass. The spatial resolution of approximately 10 arcsec FWHM is sampled with 5 arcsec pixels. Three instrument degradations have occurred since launch, two affecting entrance filters and one affecting the detector high-voltage system. This work presents the SXI instrument, its operations, and its data processing, including the impacts of the instrument degradations. A companion paper (Pizzo et al., this issue) presents SXI performance prior to an instrument degradation that occurred on 5 November 2003 and thus applies to more than 420000 soft X-ray images of the Sun.

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Subvolt turn-on voltage self-align gate diamond emitter fabricated by self-align-gate-sharpened molding technique J.Recent development of diamond field emitter cathodes and devices fabricated from molding process is presented. Practical modifications involving the sp 2 content, surface treatment, boron doping, and tip sharpening to further enhance diamond field emission are discussed. A new fabrication process for achieving ultrasharp diamond tips with a radius of curvature less than 5 nm has been achieved and shows significant improvement in emission characteristics. Discussion of this enhanced emission in diamond microtips is presented in accordance with analysis of emission behavior. The development of high site density of uniform diamond microtip arrays is presented. We also report the development of a new technique to fabricate self-aligned gate diamond emitter diodes, which achieve very high emission characteristics at extremely low applied voltage. The latest development aims to integrate diamond field emitters with silicon-based MEMS processing technology and achieve totally monolithic diamond field emitter devices on silicon wafers. Preliminary results in the triode configuration demonstrate promising transistor characteristics suitable for vacuum microelectronic applications.

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