Mechanosynthesis core

• preceeding: tooltip preparation zone
• next: DME assembly robotics

Akin to processor cores defined by the local environments of arithmetic logic units the cores of APM systems can be considered to be the local environments of the places where mechanosynthesis is actually executed. They are located in assembly level 0.

Robotic mechanosynthesis cores can be divided into two classes: mill style and general purpose which may have a bit of a gray zone in between . [todo explain intermediate core]

General purpose cores

General purpose cores are robotic manipulators that can do special tasks that is create many of the physical permissible building material structures.

• clearly separable from the transport structure delivering the moieties
• more voluminous and slower than mill cores
• more degrees of freedom and bigger build envelope - a wide variety of robotic manipulators can be used.
• good random access to different tool-types
• carrier pellets can make sense

Mill cores

Mill cores can complement general puropuse cores to gain higher speeds (synthethisation rates).

They are charactericed trough the following traits:

• robotic transport structure and deposition structure are inseparable and may connect seamlessly to the tooltip preparation zone
• active ends of mill cores are more compact than general purpose cores
• possibly fewer degrees of freedom (e.g. only three if that suffices) & possibly smaller range of motion
• limited random access to different tool types
• no or very limited limited range of programmability (physical reversible hard-coding with diamondoid wedges may be useful)

Mill cores that use lots of axles likely consist out of a lot of structures with bending induced through dislocations or strain (strained shell structures). This suggests a rich indirect incremental technology improvement pathway leading there.

Core arrangement

Since the robotic mechanosynthesis cores form the lowermost and smallest assembly level the assembly mechanics need to be a lot bigger than the pieces they are handling (one to a few atoms) and the products. This limits the speed of a single core making it finish one product of its own size much slower than the higher up assembly levels can process and thus calls for high parallelism. Mill cores could e.g. only add a few stripes of a layer (unstrained standard infill) and then pass the extended diamondoid molecular element to the next mill core threading it from its spawning to its reception point e.g. a redundant routing layer.

General purpose cores could be used for the outer passivation and special non-regular or not yet automated structures and interspersed in the aforementioned threading.

For moiety transport for both core types rotative or reciprocative molecular mills can be used.