3D printers spit out small PCBs
"We see 3D printing contributing to the vision of a trillion-sensor world,"said James Stasiak, a distinguished technologist in printing technology at Hewlett Packard Inc.
A combination of traditional electronics with 3D printing of nanomaterials on new kinds of substrates will enable ten-cent transistors needed for the future Internet of Things, Stasiak said in a keynote. He pointed to the room-sized YieldJet inkjet printer from Kateeva Inc. (Newark, Calif.) that printed OLEDs as well as research printing with DNA and other biological materials.
On the show floor Israeli startup Nano Dimension demoed its DragonFly 2020 3D Printer for the first time in the U.S. It can print a multilayer 20×20 cm circuit board that is up to 3mm high with 80 micron traces in 3-20 hours, depending on the number of layers. The company targets users who don’t want to wait weeks it typically takes to make a board and can tolerate the USD 50,000 cost of the printer.
Nano Dimension printed tiny circuit boards at IDTechEx. (All images: EE Times)
Key to the 3D printer is a silver-conductive and an insulating ink Nano Dimension developed, printed through a 500-nozzle inkjet head from Minolta. Like many targeting this market, the company is working on a cheaper copper-conductive ink, but so far no one has solved the problem of keeping cooper from oxidizing in the print process, said Amit Dror, chief executive and co-founder of the company, shown with the new system below.
Nano Dimension got its start less than two years ago when its founders had an idea for adapting for printed-circuit boards a silver-conductive ink used for creating solar cells on a silicon wafer. Investors encouraged the founders to get listed on the Tel Aviv stock exchange where it has been able to raise $17 million. It aims to start pre-selling systems at the Consumer Electronics Show and deliver them late next year.
HP’s Stasiak said companies such as Nano Dimension ultimately should be able to print circuit boards that cost less and offer greater flexibility than traditional processes. One of the challenges using the ink jet method, however, is it is currently limited to applying femto-liter droplets that create relatively large traces, he said.
Amit Dror, chief executive and co-founder of Nano Dimension, is shown with the company’s DragonFly 2020 3D Printer at IDTechEx, held in Santa Clara Calif. (Nov. 18–19, 2015).
Michael Bell, a co-founder of the Voxel 8, at IDTechEx.
Voxel 8, a startup spun out of a Harvard research lab, also showed a 3D printer capable of making a printed circuit board. Rather than use ink jets, it employs an extrusion process using paste-like materials it develops in house. The materials and process allow it to spit out both plastic and conductive electronics.
"We can make stuff traditional pcb processes cannot such as a full 3D hearing aid or an antenna on plastic," said Michael Bell (above), a co-founder of the company that has raised $13 million in venture capital to date.
The company’s printer can create 6x6x5 inch build with 200 micron traces and will ship before May for $9,000. The company has in the lab a capability that promises traces as fine as a single micron.
Chief Marketing Officer S.J. Park of Owl Works LLC, which showed its Morpheus 3D printer at IDTechEx.
Owl Works LLC showed its Morpheus 3D printer. It can create a 340x190x330mm build with 170 micron resolution and 25-200mm height.
The system will cost $500 when it goes on sale in the spring. That’s about half the cost of similar 3D printers thanks to its use of a relatively low cost ultraviolet light sources and LCD display in place of the lasers or digital light processors other printers use, said chief marketing officer S.J. Park (above).
Stein Lundby, a Qualcomm researcher with his prototype plastic sensor platform after a keynote at IDTechEx.
The technology for electronics on plastic substrates, also known as surface electronics, is here today. Qualcomm researchers are seeking applications for it.
"We try to identify or create high-value apps that leverage these relatively crappy electronics and take advantage of their dimensions that traditional electronics do not address," said Stein Lundby, a Qualcomm researcher shown above with his prototype plastic sensor platform after a keynote at the event.
The company’s first prototype is EnFucell, a hybrid plastic circuit with Bluetooth and accelerometer chips mounted on it (seen at bottom). The Band-Aid shaped device can be placed on a golf club to measure a player’s swing.
The disposable patch uses a printed circuit and battery that can last for the duration of a game, reporting stats to a smartphone app. Researchers were able to extract useful data from the sensors with the one-time use product that avoids subjecting chips routinely to the 1500G forces generated by a golf swing, something chips embedded in a club could not withstand, he said.
Qualcomm won’t market the prototype. Instead it used it as a test case to get information on cost targets, sensor accuracy and manufacturing issues with current state-of-the-art processes. Lundby sees promise in using surface electronics to add value to everyday objects in ways that don’t necessarily put the device directly on the Internet.
Among other surface electronics at the event, Nth-Degree demoed its approach to embedding LEDs on plastic. It is selling a dev kit for its first product, an LED strip that costs $5/foot.
The company makes its own conductive ink and has a proprietary gallium nitride LED technology for creating chips it can mount on a 5 mil PET substrate, currently in sheets up to 12×12 inches. It eventually aims to sell ultrathin backlights for computer and TV displays.
The VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland demoed a capability of lighting eight LEDs using power from a smartphone sent over near-filed communications to a printed circuit. VTT’s part in the demo was a technique for mounting tiny unpackaged LEDs on a printed circuit from a third party.
VTT showed its own LED-on-plastic capabilities, something the research institute has now spun out into a commercial startup. Flexbright of Finland is currently testing its prototypes with a handful of potential customers.
About the author:
Rick Merritt, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, EE Times
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