Ease of product development (was Re: Nanotech arms race worries:all smoke and no fire?)

From: Chris Phoenix (cphoenix_at_CRNano.org)
Date: 07/14/04 

Date: 14 Jul 2004 03:02:20 GMT

John S. Novak wrote:
> In article <cccqog02sj9 at enews3.newsguy.com>, Jim Logajan wrote:
>> Furthermore, even when the first MNT assembler or nanofactory arrives on
>> the scene, the design and development problems do not go away. The
>> technology will be in virgin territory and there will be teething problems
>> in the design of products and in each generation of device. Each of these
>> problems will takes months and possibly even years to work out.
>
> This is quite, quite true.
>
> Far too many nanotech enthusiasts, and even a number of self-appointed
> experts are running around with the notion that once we have
> nanotechnology, we will automagically solve not only production
> problems, but design problems as well. .... New
> technoogies do not "solve" design problems; they render some design
> problems obsolete, ameliorate others, and introduce still other new
> design problems.

Levels of abstraction is an extremely powerful design tool. It is not
much used today for mechanical designs because the cost per feature is
large enough to require subunits to be as large as possible, thus a
major component of the entire product.

Levels of abstraction will be as useful for molecular manufacturing as
it is for software. Once a function is developed and characterized, it
will be reusable in many higher-level designs. The "teething problems"
at the level of molecular machinery will only have to be solved for a
few basic designs: a motor, a few logic gates, some bearings and other
simple mechanical components. This will admittedly be hard.

But once a set of reusable machines is developed and characterized,
there'll be no more molecular engineering needed. Just aggregation of
well-understood systems. Sure, there'll be some unexpected interactions
that will have to be debugged. But this is the kind of thing embedded
software engineers do all the time. I know--I was one for six years.
My first month on the job, I tracked down a bug in the compiler and two
in the CPU. With well-specified and simple functionality at each level,
you can learn and debug at least four to six levels of abstraction--and
that's enough to build very complex products!

Basically, I'm expecting the design of molecular manufacturing products
to be very similar to the design of software products. And when I
consider the difference in complexity between today's software and
today's physical products, I think that the "teething problems" of
MM-built products--at least the products comparable to today's
gizmos--will be relatively easy to solve.

So much for teething. Now, other design issues: Perhaps the hardest
thing will be user interface work. (It is in software, too.) Again,
today's gadgets are generally far simpler than today's software. And
it'll be possible to build a new gadget for evaluation very quickly and
cheaply.

Inter-machine standards will still be a pain: networking protocols,
physical interconnectivity, cooperative robotics... This is perhaps the
biggest issue, other than writing levels-of-abstraction CAD software.

New issue: fault tolerance and recovery. But simple duplication of
function will work for most applications, adding unnoticeably to the
cost and bulk and only fractionally to the complexity.

> LIkewise, they do not "solve" production problems,
> they merely shift the economics a bit.

Multiple orders of magnitude is not "a bit." We're talking maybe six
orders of magnitude in cost-per-feature and cost-per-function, and maybe
two or three in cost-per-strength.

Chris 

-- 
Chris Phoenix                                  cphoenix@CRNano.org
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology          http://CRNano.org