In this work we report on the synthesis and field emission properties of carbon nanotube multistage emitter arrays grown on porous silicon by catalytic thermal chemical vapor deposition. The vertically oriented multistage array structures consisted of SWNTs and thin MWNTs grown on MWNTs, confirmed by TEM and Raman analysis. Higher field emission current ∼32 times and low threshold field ∼1.5 times were obtained for these structures in comparison to only MWNT arrays. The enhanced field emission results for these multistage emitters are a consequence of higher field concentration, which is ∼3 times more than MWNTs.