Assembly layer

The layers in a nanofactory are the assembly levels mapped to the assembly layers interspersed by routing layers.

Layers as natural choice

Scaling laws say that when halfing the size of a any generalized assembly unit one can put four such units below. Those are twice as fast and produce each an eight of the amout of product the upper unit produces. Multiplied together one sees that the top layer and the layer with units of halve size below have exactly the same throughput. This works not just with halving the size but with any subdivision.

All layers in an arbitrarily deep stack (with equivalent step sizes) have equal throughput.

Slowdown through stepsize

Increasing the size of a step between layers slows down the throughput due to a shrinking manipulator per surface area number. In the extreme case one has one scanning probe microscope for a whole [[1]] op particles where it would take times way beyond the age of the universe to assemble anything human hand sized. This by the way is the reason why massive parallelity is a necessity and exponential assembly or self replication is necessary.

Increased stepsices bring the benefit of less design restrictions in the products. The lowdown incurred by them can in bounds be compensated with parallelity in parts assembly. To avoid a bottleneck all stepsizes in the stack should be similar.