General-Purpose Manufacturing Scorecard

With all the nanoscale research going on today, in many diverse fields, how can we tell which of it is relevant to molecular manufacturing?

I've written a draft of a scorecard to determine how relevant a piece of research is for general-purpose manufacturing. The draft is published on Wise-Nano.org.

The scorecard does not actually refer to nanotechnology or molecular manufacturing -- I tried to make it as widely applicable as possible. You could rate a semiconductor fab or a plastic-squirting rapid prototyping machine with this scorecard -- and they would rate higher than a lot of today's nanoscale manufacturing research. My intent is that this scorecard will be general enough to be "non-partisan," but will clearly distinguish approaches that are useful for molecular manufacturing (MM) from those that are special-purpose, unsuitable, or irrelevant.

In theory, a non-MM technology could get a high score. If such a technology is identified, then either I need to fine-tune the scorecard, or MM is not as unique as I think.

As I write this, I haven't yet figured out a way to formulate a question that addresses the issue of system and product cost. Please chip in and help me improve it.

(Please comment/contribute at the Wise-Nano page. For those who would rather talk here: Unless you request otherwise, posting a comment to this thread constitutes releasing it under a Gnu FDL license, so I can copy it to Wise-Nano.)

Chris

Comments

[Matt]

I vote against a cost consideration. Comment here