 Palladium is a high-work function metal that was shown to exhibit Schottky barrier-free contacts to semiconducting nanotubes with diameters >1.7 nm.The potential of carbon nanotubes was demonstrated in 2003 when room-temperature ballistic transistors with ohmic metal contacts and high-k gate dielectric were reported, showing 20–30x higher ON current than state-of-the-art Si MOSFETs.This presented an important advance in the field as CNT was shown to potentially outperform Si.