5 ms·

3D Printing Integrated Circuits: What's Possible Now and in the Future?

nipponese 6y ago
Why does this post keep getting re-submitted?
- nrp 6y ago
  I was curious too, and it turns out that Nano Dimension is publicly traded, has seen its market cap collapse over the last four years, and oddly seen a massive spike in trading volume over the last four months. I suspect this is another Microvision-like scenario where a stock on the verge of dropping into the pink sheets is getting gamed by people trying to convince others that it is the next big thing.
- gradschool 6y ago
  Another possibility: just loading the page pegs my cpu even with javascript disabled for as long as the tab is open or until I zap a bunch of elements. Could it be a new innovation in cryptocurrency mining?
blueblisters 6y ago
> To increase the printing resolution, the additive manufacturing industry may need to devise a completely new printing process. Currently, inkjet 3D printing provides among the highest resolution features for 3D printing PCBs, but it remains to be seen if this process can be improved to provide resolution less than 1 micron.The future of 3D printing integrated circuits will likely adapt a photolithography process or functional self-assembly process to produce integrated circuits with competitive resolution. I thought the whole appeal of 3D printing is tool-less manufacturing. Photolithography typically involves using photomasks, which is not exactly suitable for prototyping or low-volume production.
- akiselev 6y ago
  There's been lots of progress on DIY/academic maskless photolithography by using TI digital micromirror devices from projectors to reflect light into a microscope for exposing photoresist. They even sell a UV version that is just for this purpose (maskless light manipulation in general). As usual, the bigger issue is alignment between steps and the etchants. Still don't know what it has to do with 3d printing, except the article sounds like GPT3 mindlessly connecting lithographic resin 3d printers and semiconductor photolithography, with a Google Scholar search on those terms as a data set.
  - pixelface 6y ago
    formlabs released a repo to use their old model printer (form 1 / 1+) to do stuff along these lines. i've tested it as far as exposing a photoresist (after forking and fixing some issues) and it is definitely a cool thing to not have intermediate steps like transparencies or toner transfer.
  - blueblisters 6y ago
    > maskless photolithography by using TI digital micromirror devices from projectors to reflect light into a microscope I just looked this up. It's incredible that maskless photolithography is even possible. Are these devices used in any high volume processes for manufacturing PCBs, for example?
    - brennanpeterson 6y ago
      The more common maskless route is laser direct write. That is capable to micron level dimensions, and multicolor variants have been proposed to allow submicron. Ebeam direct write is capable to NM level features. Just slow. http://www.periodicstructures.com/ http://www.periodicstructures.com/ Has some neat papers on this.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Lithographic printers already exist and are now cheap. You are likely reading this comment through a photomask right now :)
sasaf5 6y ago
> researchers at the Air Force Research Laboratory and American Semiconductor recently 3D printed microcontroller SoCs from polymers on a flexible silicon substrate. Then in the source: "we took silicon IC chips and thinned them until they became flexible but retained their circuit functions." So no, they did not 3D print an SoC from polymer. Also, the chip manufacturing process is already, in a sense, additive (you deposit layers of material on each other). Unless the author is proposing printing billions of gates and wires one by one, I don't see where this is going. And if that's the case, the cost structure would exceed the traditional process many times, even if you are trying to make just a single chip.
- Taniwha 6y ago
  In a sense it is "additive", they're adding a CPU ... but then that's just what a pick and place machine does - it's how we've made PCBs for decades now
- alted 6y ago
  The best actually-printed-by-an-inkjet-printer circuits I know of are simple ring oscillators of at most ten transistors or so (e.g., [1]---and they're pretty bad transistors at that), and even the simplest microcontrollers require thousands of transistors. The paper [2] is a good review of the difficulties. Inkjet printing has at best a ≈20um minimum feature size (vs. 0.01um current transistor sizes), and the material choice is really hard: instead of silicon, you need to make semiconducting inks using funky organic molecules like 6,13‐bis(triisopropylsilylethynyl) pentacene (TIPS‐pentacene). [3] is a good recent paper trying to work around some of these limitations. So everything is still very much in the research phase. Although inkjet printed circuits won't be anywhere near current silicon circuitry anytime soon if ever (and inkjetting transistors is the best (and kinda the only) method of 3D printing circuits we currently have), the different form factor may be useful. Circuits---even if only a few thousand transistors---could be printed on 3D geometry for interesting microfluidics capabilities, flexible circuits might make good healthcare sensors, and [4] is even studying flexible spacecraft via printed electronics for surprisingly economical space debris removal. And combining all this with 3D printed mechanical parts (via, e.g., the impressive PolyJet [5], which is basically inkjetting layers and lacks only the right materials to print electronics) will be fun. (as to the source's Air Force Research Lab printed chips, yeah, I can't find further info, either, and agree it was probably sandpapering away most of the spare silicon bulk of an integrated circuit [impressive, useful, but not printing]) [1] https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.6b06041 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.6b06041 [2] https://doi.org/10.1002/admt.201700063 https://doi.org/10.1002/admt.201700063 [3] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01391-2 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01391-2 [4] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/brane-craft/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/brane-craft/ [5] https://www.stratasys.com/polyjet-technology https://www.stratasys.com/polyjet-technology
Junk_Collector 6y ago
3D printing is hype but beyond a broad assertion that it would be cheaper for high performance LRIP devices I don't feel like a case for it being better than current manufacturing techniques is made in the article. They also completely neglect the fact that you can 3D print complex sub micron structures today using a FIB (a common semiconductor tool) and the technology to do so has existed for over 30 years. It hasn't taken over yet for a reason.
- alted 6y ago
  Both FIB deposition and its cousin Focused Electron Beam-Induced Deposition (FEBID) are pretty nifty; they can cut/add materials down to maybe 1nm (!) resolution. However, they're extremely slow: they can only affect a single spot at a time and move at maybe only 100nm/s movement, so patterning a useful circuit may take days; it's mostly useful for research work. I don't think I've seen anyone figure out the chemistry to use it to print doped semiconductors, so transistors might not be doable anyway. Really the only other sub-micrometer 3D printing category right now is two-photon lithography (shine a laser to cure a liquid resin into a solid, like common resin 3D printing), which can generally only use a single, even-more-specialized-than-required-for-inkjet material---almost always an insulating polymer---for an entire structure.
- bluGill 6y ago
  What quantity? With a traditional fab process it costs a million dollars to create the setup for your chip, but once you have that the cost of each chip is five cents. I suspect that there is basically no setup costs for this but each chips probably runs in the range of 100 each to make (I'm guessing here, but it looks to me like there is a lot of labor watching the printer). If you need only a few chips the printed process is cheaper, if you need millones the traditional process is cheaper.
bsder 6y ago
As always, the problem in VLSI isn't technology--it's tools. Places like X-Fab can run a mask set for you at around $50K. Tools will run you $150K+. Side note: X-Fab, fix your !@#$ing site already. You got hacked on July 5th. Still being unable to log in a month later doesn't bespeak competence.
lvs 6y ago
This article is really too lightweight. It's not as much a review of current research as it is something that would fill whitespace in an industry mag.
Animats 6y ago
Electron beam lithography for direct writing ICs has been around for decades. Put down a layer of resist, expose with a steered electron beam. It works fine, down to at least 7nm, but it's slow. It's never been cost effective for making ICs, except for occasional one-offs. It's mostly used to make masks.
- alted 6y ago
  Sure. Heidelberg's recently made [1] some cool tools ("maskless aligners") that can expose a ≈150mm wafer in an hour or so down to ≈500nm resolution, which is very convenient when rapidly iterating through one-off low-resolution designs or something in a research lab (for comparison, electron beam lithography does the same to ≈10nm resolution in maybe a day). It's still part of the whole fabricate-everything-as-2D-layers-on-a-wafer paradigm, though, and has the same limitations (e.g., temperature limits) as standard silicon circuitry made with conventional photolithography. [1] https://heidelberg-instruments.com/en/#products https://heidelberg-instruments.com/en/#products
girishso 6y ago
I mis-read the title, thought it’s about 3D printing the PCBs. That’s something easily achievable and useful to hobbyists like myself.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  That's relatively easily achievable, a stepping stone on the path to ICs, and serves a large market that already exists. Yet, I think there are no commercial offers, and no companies focused on building it (differently from ICs). Go figure.
  - joshvm 6y ago
    This does somewhat exist for commercial 3D printed PCBs (not ICs) : https://www.lpkf.com/en/industries-technologies/electronics-manufacturing/3d-mids-with-laser-direct-structuring-lds https://www.lpkf.com/en/industries-technologies/electronics-... LPKF sell a funky machine which will deposit 3D traces onto a printed part. We have one of these in a lab at our uni, along with a lot of other expensive LPKF kit, but it's so specialised that I doubt anyone ever uses it. They have lots of interesting demo parts made with it, the obvious use case is antennas that are embedded in the enclosure.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      I was thinking more on the line of cheap one-off PCBs that you send from your computer and take from the machine in an hour or two, like what hobbyists are doing. This one is so much cooler but more expensive too. I hope they find some large market to grow into.
      - joshvm 6y ago
        Yeah LPKF's stuff is very high end. I'm 99% sure the only reason we have any of their machines is that someone had a massive budget to blow with a tight deadline. Or they had no idea what they were buying and got sweet talked by a rep. Or they absolutely knew what they were buying and someone high up just signed off on it. We also have stuff like Metal 3D printers which are six-figures, so why not? The problem with using is that it's so expensive, so nobody is allowed to use it without training. Everyone else just submits jobs to the mech workshop and they'll etch it for you. But.. when you think that a one-day turnaround on a small run of PCBs can cost easily $500+ if you need weird requirements, these sorts of machine can start to save money. They can do tolerances below most of the cheap fab houses (like BGA fanout, RF parts, etc). PCBTrain will charge you £400 for a 2-day turnaround on a 50x50mm 2 layer board! At home I don't know why you'd want to 3D print a circuit versus milling or laser exposing it. You can get cheap mills with decent tolerances these days [1]. Of course LPKF also sell these sorts of machines with absurd tolerances and high prices! In theory you can use conductive filament and a multi-material printer. One use case for that is actually making custom RF shields. Otherwise the only 3D printed circuits I've seen are kind of cheating - either using the printer to make the etch mask, or by printing channels which you can fill with conductive paint or epoxy (those are nice though). [1] https://wegstr.com/CNC-Wegstr-(English) https://wegstr.com/CNC-Wegstr-(English)
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
While possibility of creating ICs in a "homelab" remains years or decades in the future, it is an innovation that is very important to strive for. The world of information has become increasingly dangerous, and trust is in short supply. We need stronger guarantees that our computational hardware is secure and backdoor-free and the best (but not perfect) way of doing it is to manufacture it yourself. Libre Silicon [1] is one organization that is striving forward and I am hopeful they will make great progress. Edit: when a high schooler can fabricate ICs in his garage [2], you know with enough effort, a lot of progress can be made on the problem [1] https://libresilicon.com/ https://libresilicon.com/ [2] http://sam.zeloof.xyz/first-ic/ http://sam.zeloof.xyz/first-ic/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657398
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  The last news in the news section of the libresilicon site you linked was from 2018 - is it in active development still?
  - av3csr 6y ago
    There was a talk at CCC late last year where they talked about their std cell library [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jA7BHuAo9u0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jA7BHuAo9u0]
soyrunner 6y ago
Back in the 1970's Page Burr at Photocircuits developed Multiwire.
tmaly 6y ago
I know its a bit off in the future, but imagine the possibilities of doing this from your garage. We could see all sorts of innovation.

Why does this post keep getting re-submitted?

nrp 6y ago
I was curious too, and it turns out that Nano Dimension is publicly traded, has seen its market cap collapse over the last four years, and oddly seen a massive spike in trading volume over the last four months. I suspect this is another Microvision-like scenario where a stock on the verge of dropping into the pink sheets is getting gamed by people trying to convince others that it is the next big thing.
gradschool 6y ago
Another possibility: just loading the page pegs my cpu even with javascript disabled for as long as the tab is open or until I zap a bunch of elements. Could it be a new innovation in cryptocurrency mining?

> To increase the printing resolution, the additive manufacturing industry may need to devise a completely new printing process. Currently, inkjet 3D printing provides among the highest resolution features for 3D printing PCBs, but it remains to be seen if this process can be improved to provide resolution less than 1 micron.The future of 3D printing integrated circuits will likely adapt a photolithography process or functional self-assembly process to produce integrated circuits with competitive resolution. I thought the whole appeal of 3D printing is tool-less manufacturing. Photolithography typically involves using photomasks, which is not exactly suitable for prototyping or low-volume production.

akiselev 6y ago
There's been lots of progress on DIY/academic maskless photolithography by using TI digital micromirror devices from projectors to reflect light into a microscope for exposing photoresist. They even sell a UV version that is just for this purpose (maskless light manipulation in general). As usual, the bigger issue is alignment between steps and the etchants. Still don't know what it has to do with 3d printing, except the article sounds like GPT3 mindlessly connecting lithographic resin 3d printers and semiconductor photolithography, with a Google Scholar search on those terms as a data set.
- pixelface 6y ago
  formlabs released a repo to use their old model printer (form 1 / 1+) to do stuff along these lines. i've tested it as far as exposing a photoresist (after forking and fixing some issues) and it is definitely a cool thing to not have intermediate steps like transparencies or toner transfer.
- blueblisters 6y ago
  > maskless photolithography by using TI digital micromirror devices from projectors to reflect light into a microscope I just looked this up. It's incredible that maskless photolithography is even possible. Are these devices used in any high volume processes for manufacturing PCBs, for example?
  - brennanpeterson 6y ago
    The more common maskless route is laser direct write. That is capable to micron level dimensions, and multicolor variants have been proposed to allow submicron. Ebeam direct write is capable to NM level features. Just slow. http://www.periodicstructures.com/ http://www.periodicstructures.com/ Has some neat papers on this.
kube-system 6y ago
Lithographic printers already exist and are now cheap. You are likely reading this comment through a photomask right now :)

sasaf5 6y ago

> researchers at the Air Force Research Laboratory and American Semiconductor recently 3D printed microcontroller SoCs from polymers on a flexible silicon substrate. Then in the source: "we took silicon IC chips and thinned them until they became flexible but retained their circuit functions." So no, they did not 3D print an SoC from polymer. Also, the chip manufacturing process is already, in a sense, additive (you deposit layers of material on each other). Unless the author is proposing printing billions of gates and wires one by one, I don't see where this is going. And if that's the case, the cost structure would exceed the traditional process many times, even if you are trying to make just a single chip.

Taniwha 6y ago
In a sense it is "additive", they're adding a CPU ... but then that's just what a pick and place machine does - it's how we've made PCBs for decades now
alted 6y ago
The best actually-printed-by-an-inkjet-printer circuits I know of are simple ring oscillators of at most ten transistors or so (e.g., [1]---and they're pretty bad transistors at that), and even the simplest microcontrollers require thousands of transistors. The paper [2] is a good review of the difficulties. Inkjet printing has at best a ≈20um minimum feature size (vs. 0.01um current transistor sizes), and the material choice is really hard: instead of silicon, you need to make semiconducting inks using funky organic molecules like 6,13‐bis(triisopropylsilylethynyl) pentacene (TIPS‐pentacene). [3] is a good recent paper trying to work around some of these limitations. So everything is still very much in the research phase. Although inkjet printed circuits won't be anywhere near current silicon circuitry anytime soon if ever (and inkjetting transistors is the best (and kinda the only) method of 3D printing circuits we currently have), the different form factor may be useful. Circuits---even if only a few thousand transistors---could be printed on 3D geometry for interesting microfluidics capabilities, flexible circuits might make good healthcare sensors, and [4] is even studying flexible spacecraft via printed electronics for surprisingly economical space debris removal. And combining all this with 3D printed mechanical parts (via, e.g., the impressive PolyJet [5], which is basically inkjetting layers and lacks only the right materials to print electronics) will be fun. (as to the source's Air Force Research Lab printed chips, yeah, I can't find further info, either, and agree it was probably sandpapering away most of the spare silicon bulk of an integrated circuit [impressive, useful, but not printing]) [1] https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.6b06041 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.6b06041 [2] https://doi.org/10.1002/admt.201700063 https://doi.org/10.1002/admt.201700063 [3] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01391-2 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01391-2 [4] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/brane-craft/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/brane-craft/ [5] https://www.stratasys.com/polyjet-technology https://www.stratasys.com/polyjet-technology

Junk_Collector 6y ago

3D printing is hype but beyond a broad assertion that it would be cheaper for high performance LRIP devices I don't feel like a case for it being better than current manufacturing techniques is made in the article. They also completely neglect the fact that you can 3D print complex sub micron structures today using a FIB (a common semiconductor tool) and the technology to do so has existed for over 30 years. It hasn't taken over yet for a reason.

alted 6y ago
Both FIB deposition and its cousin Focused Electron Beam-Induced Deposition (FEBID) are pretty nifty; they can cut/add materials down to maybe 1nm (!) resolution. However, they're extremely slow: they can only affect a single spot at a time and move at maybe only 100nm/s movement, so patterning a useful circuit may take days; it's mostly useful for research work. I don't think I've seen anyone figure out the chemistry to use it to print doped semiconductors, so transistors might not be doable anyway. Really the only other sub-micrometer 3D printing category right now is two-photon lithography (shine a laser to cure a liquid resin into a solid, like common resin 3D printing), which can generally only use a single, even-more-specialized-than-required-for-inkjet material---almost always an insulating polymer---for an entire structure.
bluGill 6y ago
What quantity? With a traditional fab process it costs a million dollars to create the setup for your chip, but once you have that the cost of each chip is five cents. I suspect that there is basically no setup costs for this but each chips probably runs in the range of 100 each to make (I'm guessing here, but it looks to me like there is a lot of labor watching the printer). If you need only a few chips the printed process is cheaper, if you need millones the traditional process is cheaper.

bsder 6y ago

As always, the problem in VLSI isn't technology--it's tools. Places like X-Fab can run a mask set for you at around $50K. Tools will run you $150K+. Side note: X-Fab, fix your !@#$ing site already. You got hacked on July 5th. Still being unable to log in a month later doesn't bespeak competence.

lvs 6y ago

This article is really too lightweight. It's not as much a review of current research as it is something that would fill whitespace in an industry mag.

Animats 6y ago

Electron beam lithography for direct writing ICs has been around for decades. Put down a layer of resist, expose with a steered electron beam. It works fine, down to at least 7nm, but it's slow. It's never been cost effective for making ICs, except for occasional one-offs. It's mostly used to make masks.

alted 6y ago
Sure. Heidelberg's recently made [1] some cool tools ("maskless aligners") that can expose a ≈150mm wafer in an hour or so down to ≈500nm resolution, which is very convenient when rapidly iterating through one-off low-resolution designs or something in a research lab (for comparison, electron beam lithography does the same to ≈10nm resolution in maybe a day). It's still part of the whole fabricate-everything-as-2D-layers-on-a-wafer paradigm, though, and has the same limitations (e.g., temperature limits) as standard silicon circuitry made with conventional photolithography. [1] https://heidelberg-instruments.com/en/#products https://heidelberg-instruments.com/en/#products

girishso 6y ago

I mis-read the title, thought it’s about 3D printing the PCBs. That’s something easily achievable and useful to hobbyists like myself.

marcosdumay 6y ago
That's relatively easily achievable, a stepping stone on the path to ICs, and serves a large market that already exists. Yet, I think there are no commercial offers, and no companies focused on building it (differently from ICs). Go figure.
- joshvm 6y ago
  This does somewhat exist for commercial 3D printed PCBs (not ICs) : https://www.lpkf.com/en/industries-technologies/electronics-manufacturing/3d-mids-with-laser-direct-structuring-lds https://www.lpkf.com/en/industries-technologies/electronics-... LPKF sell a funky machine which will deposit 3D traces onto a printed part. We have one of these in a lab at our uni, along with a lot of other expensive LPKF kit, but it's so specialised that I doubt anyone ever uses it. They have lots of interesting demo parts made with it, the obvious use case is antennas that are embedded in the enclosure.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    I was thinking more on the line of cheap one-off PCBs that you send from your computer and take from the machine in an hour or two, like what hobbyists are doing. This one is so much cooler but more expensive too. I hope they find some large market to grow into.
    - joshvm 6y ago
      Yeah LPKF's stuff is very high end. I'm 99% sure the only reason we have any of their machines is that someone had a massive budget to blow with a tight deadline. Or they had no idea what they were buying and got sweet talked by a rep. Or they absolutely knew what they were buying and someone high up just signed off on it. We also have stuff like Metal 3D printers which are six-figures, so why not? The problem with using is that it's so expensive, so nobody is allowed to use it without training. Everyone else just submits jobs to the mech workshop and they'll etch it for you. But.. when you think that a one-day turnaround on a small run of PCBs can cost easily $500+ if you need weird requirements, these sorts of machine can start to save money. They can do tolerances below most of the cheap fab houses (like BGA fanout, RF parts, etc). PCBTrain will charge you £400 for a 2-day turnaround on a 50x50mm 2 layer board! At home I don't know why you'd want to 3D print a circuit versus milling or laser exposing it. You can get cheap mills with decent tolerances these days [1]. Of course LPKF also sell these sorts of machines with absurd tolerances and high prices! In theory you can use conductive filament and a multi-material printer. One use case for that is actually making custom RF shields. Otherwise the only 3D printed circuits I've seen are kind of cheating - either using the printer to make the etch mask, or by printing channels which you can fill with conductive paint or epoxy (those are nice though). [1] https://wegstr.com/CNC-Wegstr-(English) https://wegstr.com/CNC-Wegstr-(English)

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

While possibility of creating ICs in a "homelab" remains years or decades in the future, it is an innovation that is very important to strive for. The world of information has become increasingly dangerous, and trust is in short supply. We need stronger guarantees that our computational hardware is secure and backdoor-free and the best (but not perfect) way of doing it is to manufacture it yourself. Libre Silicon [1] is one organization that is striving forward and I am hopeful they will make great progress. Edit: when a high schooler can fabricate ICs in his garage [2], you know with enough effort, a lot of progress can be made on the problem [1] https://libresilicon.com/ https://libresilicon.com/ [2] http://sam.zeloof.xyz/first-ic/ http://sam.zeloof.xyz/first-ic/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657398

UncleOxidant 6y ago
The last news in the news section of the libresilicon site you linked was from 2018 - is it in active development still?
- av3csr 6y ago
  There was a talk at CCC late last year where they talked about their std cell library [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jA7BHuAo9u0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jA7BHuAo9u0]

soyrunner 6y ago

Back in the 1970's Page Burr at Photocircuits developed Multiwire.

tmaly 6y ago

I know its a bit off in the future, but imagine the possibilities of doing this from your garage. We could see all sorts of innovation.