Our paper reviews several discoveries regarding carbon nanotubes, most notably the current-carrying capacity of metallic carbon nanotubes, as well as the mobility and transconductance of semiconducting nanotubes.

Our paper shows that there are no fundamental physical limits to developing a nanoelectronics technology based on carbon nanotubes that would be superior to current silicon microelectronics. The charge-carrier mobility in semiconducting carbon nanotubes is significantly higher than in silicon, and the transconductance per width in present nanotube transistors significantly exceeds that achievable in silicon transistors. In addition, metallic nanotubes can carry very high current densities, orders of magnitude higher than the densities at which conventional metal wires fail due to electromigration, indicating possible usefulness as interconnects.

I became interested in nanotube-based nanoelectronics while I was a postdoctoral researcher with Paul McEuen (another author of this paper) at the University of California at Berkeley. I am currently continuing research on nanoelectronics based on carbon nanotubes and other nanomaterials at the University of Maryland.