(3D printer for making circuit boards) At a technology conference in Silicon Valley hosted by market research firm IDTechEx, two companies demonstrated 3D printers that can “spit out” small circuit boards, while others such as Qualcomm showed advances in placing electronic parts on plastic substrates.
“We see 3D printing as a way to bring about a world with supersensors,” says James Stasiak, a printing technology specialist at Hewlett-Packard. In a keynote address, He said YieldJet printers, which are already available from room-sized manufacturers such as Kateeva, are combining traditional electronic components with 3D printing of nanomaterials on new substrates to meet the future demand for low-cost sensors for the Internet of Things. It can produce OLED components and conduct research on DNA printing and other biological materials.
At the workshop, Israeli startup Nano Dimension made its U.S. debut with DragonFly 2020 3D printer, which is capable of creating multilayer boards that are 20 centimeters (cm) square, about 3 millimeters (mm) high, and only 80 micron (micron) wide. Depending on the number of layers, it takes only 3 to 20 hours.
Nano Dimension lock-in is for board users who don’t want to wait (which can take weeks to build) and can afford to spend about $50,000 on a printer; The company plans to begin preorders of its 3D printers at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show and start shipping them at the end of next year.
The Nano Dimension 3D printer is based on a silver conductive ink and the company’s own insulating ink, with a Minolta 500-Nozzle. Like many others targeting the same market, the company is developing cheaper copper conductive inks, but so far no one in the industry has overcome the problem of keeping copper from oxidizing during printing, says co-founder and CHIEF Executive Amit Dror. HP’s Stasiak says companies like Nano Dimension could eventually offer a cheaper and more flexible way to make printed circuit boards than traditional methods. But one of the challenges with inkjet, he said, is that current technology provides only femto-liter ink droplets, making for relatively large circuit board traces.
A 3D printer for making circuit boards by extrusion forming technology
Another startup, Voxel 8, born out of a Lab at Harvard, also showed off a 3D printer that can make circuit boards. Instead of inkjet, the circuit board is made by extrusion using a toothpaste-like material developed by the company. The materials and manufacturing process allow Voxel 8’s 3D printer to make conductive as well as plastic electronic components.
