Atom placement frequency

For nanofactories to be able to put human scale objects together atom by atom in reasonable timespans they need to place atoms at mind boggling rates.

Example

Assuming f₀ = 1MHz atom placement frequency per mechanosynthesis core how many cores (N_core) does one need to reach the desired throughput of Q₀ = 1kg/h ?
N_core = Q₀ / (m_C * f₀) = ~1.4*10¹⁵ cores (about an 1.4 Petacore system). (m_C … mass of carbon atom.)
A core size of ~(32nm)³ = ~32000(nm³) seems to be a sensible guess for advanced APM systems.
All the cores together then take a volume of size ~45(mm³) = ~ 45microliters.
This can be spread out plenty to remove high levels of waste heat.
The effective atom placement frequency in this system is f₀*N_core = 1.4*10²¹ atoms per second (1.4ZHz – quite mind boggling) (>> 10⁹ Atoms/second).

Early mechanosynthetic systems will be several orders of magnitude lower in throughput though.

• They will have low temporal placement frequency
• they may be only two dimensional
• but they'll be already massively parallel

Related

• Mechanosynthesis core
• Mechanosynthesis
• Convergent assembly