There is limited room at the bottom

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The name of this page was chosen as a complement to the title of Richard Feynmans famous talk.

Optimizing for throughput

Assembling matter almost atom by atom (ignoring hydrogen atoms) with
machinery featuring pretty much the same atomic granularity
poses some challenges to get all the needed machinery in a space as small as possible.

Two pathways to optimize – time and space

To reach a good high atom placement frequency
reactions must be performed densely in both …

  • time (placement frequency frequency per active core / active site) and in
  • space (spacial periodicity of active cores / active sites)

Limits along these two optimization pathways

The temporal density is limited by friction growing quadratically with speed.
Thus going much beyond ~5mm/s equating to about ~1MHz for nanoscale wheels in mechanosynthesis is not really viable.

Optimizing spacial density of reaction sites is a matter of geometric system design optimizations.
The limit here is how much functionality can be crammed in how little space.

Spacial density optimization consequence: Standard part mass production in on-chip nanofactories.

These optimizations lead to on-chip nanofactories with semi hard-coded structures
in their bottom-most assembly level as dedicated one task machines can be build much more compact than fully general purpose ones.
See: Bottom scale assembly lines in gem-gum factories.

These optimizations lead away from Molecular assemblers as advanced productive nanosystem (outdated).
As these would need to cram full selfreplicativity capability in a very small volume,
which is asking for fully general purpose mechanism for piezomecanosynthesis.
And those are necessarily much slower than specialized assembly lines.

Related

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