Convergent assembly

From Wise Nano

Convergent assembly is a way to make large products out of tiny ones. Eight small cubes can be joined together to make one larger cube. This can be repeated as many times as necessary; just fifteen such steps will create a centimeter-sized cube from trillions of sub-micron-sized cubes.

Advantages

Conceptually simple; mechanically simple as long as the cube attachment doesn't require much manipulation.

Several papers have been written on it already.

Disadvantages

Products tend to be blocky. Chris Phoenix proposed unfolding or inflating them after manufacture, and handwaved very cleverly in his Nanofactory paper about how this could work for long skinny components, but basically it would be a pain to design for this. Working face aggregation appears to be a better approach.