V_V comments on [Link] Reddit, help me find some peace I'm dying young - Less Wrong Discussion
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Not really my field of expertise, but if I understand correctly, this refers to scanning tunneling microscope tips for atom-by-atom assembly. While certainly interesting for research purposes, this doesn't seem to be a scalable manufacturing technology.
I'm not sure about the scalability of mechanosynthesis, either (Massive parallelism gets thrown around a lot, but there may be something to convergent assembly) , but I was just talking about the basic tip chemistry.
Zyvex has a similar process called Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy which seems more promising as a large-scale manufacturing technology, but I have not seen designs for nanofactories of megadalton-scale products made using PALE.