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 per mechanosynthesis core how many cores (Ncore) does one need to reach the desired throughput of Q0 = 1kg/h ? Ncore = Q0 / (m_C * f0) = ~1.4*10^15 cores (1.4 Petacore). (m_C … mass of carbon atom) A core size of ~(32nm)^3 = ~32000(nm^3) seems to be a sensible guess for advanced APM systems. All the cores together then take a volume of size ~45(mm^3) = ~ 45microliters. This can be spread out plenty to remove high levels of waste heat. The effective atom placement frequency in this system is f_0*N_core = 1.4*10^21 atoms per second (1.4ZHz – quite mind boggling) (>> 10^9 Atoms/second). Early mechanosynthetic systems (low temporal frequency – likely 2D but already massively parallel) will be several orders of magnitude lower in throughput.
