Microcomponent

[Todo: improve stub; add better definition]

Microcomponents form (re)composable functional units. They make up diamondoid metamaterials and thus provide the basis for advanced AP products. Microcomponents are mainly composed / buit out of standard diamondoid molecular elements and are in the size range from roughly 0.1µm to 5.0µm. Their size constitutes a trade-off between re-usability and space usage efficiency and is (in technology level III) limited by the assembly level II building chamber sizes of the generating Nanofactory.

Since it can be desirable to operate microcomponents in a non vacuum environment (separation of assembly levels) and one should want to be able to recycle them, microcomponents should have no exposed open bonds ( = chemical radicals) on their external surfaces and should preferably use reversible locking mechanisms.

In the simplest case one could use a simple cube as delimiting base shape. Stacking them then forms a simple cubic microcomponent crystal. To get less anisotropic behavior of metamaterials one can make them have the shape of either of:

• truncated octahedrons (the Wigner Seitz cell of the body centered cubic system bcc) preserve parts of the cubes <100> surface planes and expose much of the <111> octahedral planes which are conveniently normal to diamond bonds (when standard orientation is choosen) Completely flat surfaces for Van der Waals bonding can be used since partly finished assemblies always have (in contrast to partly finished assemblies of simple cubes) dents that prevent side-ward sliding.
• rhombic dodecaherdons (the Wigner Seitz cell of the face centered cubic system fcc)

Base cells of more complicated crystal structures or even quasi-crystals will make geometric reasoning exceedingly hard and will therefore probably only be considered if needed for a good reason. Some examples:

• tetrahedrons and octahedrons ("geomag-spacefill")
• space fills not derived from crystal structure base cells
• Weaire–Phelan structure - structure with the least surface area (yet unproven)

Further shapes are:

• tubbing segments (like in tunnel construction work) for curved parts of several µm size
• adapter cells from one space-fill to another
• partly rounded cells for outer shells

Microcomponents are also mentioned on the "assembly levels" page and all over the place on this wiki.