3 ms·
Soon! But not quite yet. Like deelowe said, for now, this DragonFly is limited to simple conductors/insulators(dielectrics), which means fancy 3D PCBs (or embe
by alted 6y ago
Soon! But not quite yet.
Like deelowe said, for now, this DragonFly is limited to simple conductors/insulators(dielectrics), which means fancy 3D PCBs (or embedded antennas---see their RFID paper). Transistors, using semiconductors, are significantly trickier.
But special inkjet printers can actually print transistors (e.g., [1])! This is very exciting for the obvious reasons---integrate this with a DragonFly/PolyJet 3D printer/etc. to print complete electronc devices. However, the printers have to use different materials available in ink forms instead of silicon, and even the best are limited to ~20um feature sizes due to ink dispensing difficulties (vs. 0.01um current transistor sizes), so they're still in the research stage.
[1] Grubb et al., "Inkjet Printing of High Performance Transistors with Micron Order Chemically Set Gaps", Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01391-2 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01391-2
- mechagodzilla 6y agoThis is extremely cool - there are plenty of things you could do with ~20um feature sizes if it could be integrated with a printer like this (especially if the process was relatively low power and could be stacked in 3D).
- yourapostasy 6y agoSo could I potentially combine this with a resin 3D printer, and make macro-sized molycirc-style, solid-chunks-of-electronics? If so, this would be really interesting to make individually-unique, ORWL-style computers that are a single solid chunk of completely randomly-placed 3D circuitry, embedded in a riot of colors of epoxy. With a set of completely randomly-routed 100um wires interlaced throughout the 3D volume to detect physical penetration. And if you could control the sputtering of the nanoparticles, then that wire could be made more hard to detect in random spots. No maintenance, but that wouldn't be on the list of requirements.