About 30 years ago, 3D printing began as a technology for rapid prototyping, allowing designers, engineers and manufacturers to quickly produce physical mockups of their designs. As 3D printing matures, however, it’s growing into a method for actually manufacturing end components in a wide selection of materials and across industries.
Likewise, Israeli firm Nano Dimension offers entered the manufacturing space with a technology with the capacity of quickly prototyping multilayered printed circuit boards (PCBs). At the brief moment, but not yet released commercially, the DragonFly 2020 3D printer can 3D print PCBs in order that engineers and producers can iterate circuit board ideas quicker and affordably than they might through traditional methods. Later on, however , it’s easy to imagine this technology evolving to 3D print end parts-in this case, fully functional electronic devices.
The DragonFly 2020 is Nano Dimension’s electronics 3D printer. ( Image courtesy of Nano Dimension. )
In an interview with ENGINEERING. com, Simon Fried, CBO of Nano Dimension, spoke as to the company’s technology, where it’s heading and the benefits he sees PCB 3D printing bringing to the manufacturing industry right now.
What Does It Try 3D Print a Circuit?
In speaking with Fried, it became very clear that the DragonFly 2020 is a real 3D printing platform, but one that has been specialized for the 3D printing of PCBs. The system deposits inks to inkjet 3D printers in the marketplace similarly. While one of these brilliant inks is really a photopolymer still, as noticed with Stratasys’ PolyJet or 3D Systems’ MultiJet, another comprises of conductive silver nanoparticles highly.
Nano Dimension’s Switch software for preparing Gerber files for 3D printing. (Image courtesy of Nano Dimension. )
The DragonFly 2020 jets these two materials layer by layer, beginning with the underside conductive traces and ending with the topside conductors. The result is really a functioning circuit board. Once all auxiliary consumer electronics are added, such as for example resistors and transistors, users will start testing their PCB concepts.
“We realized right from the start that inkjetting was the main element technology because of this application, ” Fried explained. “There are some areas where we see the technology as being a strong one. The printers most capable of multimaterial 3D printing are inkjet 3D printers. Later on if we want to raise the speed and size of this type of operational system, we are able to add more printheads. ”
Though similar to various other inkjet 3D printing processes, the DragonFly 2020 3D printer and the inks, both developed by Nano Dimension, are designed specifically for the circuit table printing process. For instance, the photopolymer used for PCB printing is not the same material utilized by various other inkjet 3D printers, Fried described. The materials is engineered to become a functional material, to have specific dielectric properties, necessary to insulate the conductive ink and allow for subsequent layers of circuit boards to be built. Additionally, the dielectric ink features high thermal stability and can even withstand temperatures up to 300 °C (572 °F).
Nano Dimension’s AgCite brand of conductive ink has been developed with a license from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem through the Yissum Research Development Company. Made up of highly conductive silver nanoparticles, the material is engineered according to the substrate on which it will be used, with the form, distribution and size of the silver contaminants optimized for maximum conductivity.
As the dielectric ink is cured with a straightforward LED lamp, the conductive ink is sintered by a power source, another very clear distinction from traditional inkjet 3D publishing. Fried indicated that this sintering process, built into the DragonFly 2020 3D printer, is a necessary step for fusing the particles into a solid conductive trace.
Also unique is the resolution possible with the DragonFly 2020. Depositing photopolymers at layers as fine as 2 microns, the printer is capable of finer resolutions than any photopolymer jetting process available. This is an essential requirement of the fabrication of PCBs getting developed for brand-new generations of electronic devices.
Changing the Printed Electronics Sector:
With the DragonFly platform, Nano Dimension is bringing invention both to the global worlds of PCB production and 3D printing. In today’s, 3D printing functional components, such as for example conductive ink, means generating custom PCB boards on the fly. In the future, the technology lends itself to fabricating fully functional end parts.
Fried pointed out that, at just 3 mm, the Z-axis height of the DragonFly 2020 3D printer may not be all that impressive to those in the 3D printing industry, nonetheless it leaves of room for publishing complex multilayer boards plenty.
could be about 16 layer boards within your smartphone “There. Those boards are costly and remember to make. The more technical the board, the even more layers there are and the higher the justification for bringing the technology internal. Although even lower coating counts will take advantage of the speed of iteration” Fried stated.
The DragonFly 2020 electronics 3D printer from Nano Dimension. ( Picture thanks to Nano Dimension. )
According to a recently available survey of 300 electronics producers and designers conducted simply by Nano Dimension, 93 percent of respondents turn to short- run third-party manufacturers for their PCB prototyping needs. All respondents spent at least $10, 000 per year on prototyping their circuit boards, with 43 percent spending between $10, 000 and $50, 000 and some spending over $100, 000 on prototyping PCBs annually.
Fried compared the power of Nano Dimension’s technology for PCB design to the talents 3D printing provides mechanical and design engineers. “ In a single corner of the laboratory, you’ve obtained your mechanical engineer who’s able to iterate designs rapidly by 3D publishing them one following the other. In another corner, you’ve got the program engineer who can just try the software the moment it’s created. Then, you’ve got the electrical engineer in the middle of the room wishing he or she could test out designs so quickly, but he or she may have to wait several weeks for the prototype to come back from a PCB supplier. ”
“Another consideration is the IP, ” Fried added. “ How long do you want to sit with your IP in- home before you danger taking your designs to an authorized to possess your board manufactured? ”
Fried explained that, at the brief moment, PCBs 3D printed along with his company’s technology might not be as solid as those made out of traditional manufacturing, but they start new design possibilities. For example, PCBs aren’t restricted in the planar shape they currently use and can even have some free-from geometries and cavities, though, because Nano Dimension has not yet introduced a soluble support material, they could not have the overhangs along with other geometric complexities connected with other 3D printing technologies.
Just as that 3D printing has taken a significant change to manufacturing, Fried remarked that the opportunity to design PCBs for 3D printing will start new possibilities in circuit plank production that not Nano Dimension can envision quite yet. “We present the technology to labs, and at first, it seems like it may just be a machine for prototyping PCBs, but soon these researchers are thinking, ‘I wonder if you could do this with it, ’ or ‘What in the event that you tried deploying it for that? ’ It looks like it could be for prototyping circuit boards right now just, but I believe we’ll see some quite interesting uses for the technologies very soon, ” Fried said.
Multimaterial 3D Printing:
Fried explained that the holy grail for electronics printing is the ability to print with copper inks, due to its high conductivity and low cost. However , the material is hard to work with in nanoparticle form as it oxidizes quickly when subjected to air and, oxidized, will not conduct electricity well. Subsequently, Nano Dimension started with silver inks due to the fact the material had been furthest along for the reasons of 3D printing PCBs, however the company proceeds researching the growth of copper components and filed a patent for a proprietary copper ink in November 2015.
Until that copper ink is released, Nano Dimension is continuing focus on other components as well. For instance, the company signed an agreement with Tel Aviv University related to nickel nanoparticles. Nickel has good mechanical and corrosion resistance qualities, but nickel nanoparticles ink is complicated and contains to be formulated for jettability carefully.
As a way has been produced by the university to stabilize nickel nanoparticle suspensions, Nano Dimension’s technologies could enable the embedding of nickel-based sensors within PCBs directly. This ability, extremely hard with traditional PCB manufacturing, allows for the creation of circuit boards with the built-in capacity to monitor such energies as magnetism, radiation and temperature.
Nano Dimension’s technology is not limited to photopolymers and conductive inks. In a surprise move, the company announced this May the successful 3D printing of stem cell-derived tissues in conjunction with Accellta, another Israeli firm in the bioengineering market.
Fried spoke to the partnership: “We started to think about how most bioprinters use an extrusion-based technology, which makes them significantly slower. We thought that, as inkjetting is a much quicker process, we might be able to 3D print with cells at a faster pace. Those additional systems don’t always achieve the very best cell viability also. They shall have maybe about 30 or 40 percent of the cells survive the printing process. ”
Fried added, “ Thus, we met a great companion and just carried out some preliminary studies-just altered our hardware a little and transformed the inks to discover what we could do. We were able to achieve 80 or 90 percent cell viability, which was just amazing. ” Nano Dimension and Accellta are currently considering the launch of a join entity, a separate company that would not detract from the money or focus of the founding firms.
The continuing future of Electronics 3D Printing:
What these tasks demonstrate is that inkjetting is extensible and not simply suitable for one material type highly. For this reason, publishing conductive inks could feasibly end up being coupled with printing a number of materials in order to enable additional electrical properties such as resistance, capacitance and inductance. In the near term, it might be possible to print flexible circuit boards using elastomeric photopolymer substrates, but , ultimately, this could result in printing functional objects fully, according to Fried.
“Right your smartphone includes a PCB and an incident now, but it is possible to imagine the consumer electronics all 3D printed alongside the case, ” Fried said. “ Eventually, challenging components integrated into an individual object, this could save space, allowing us to shrink the electronics even further. ”
Though such a multimaterial electronics printer may not be rolled out this year, it is something that Nano Dimension is functioning towards clearly. It should be observed that it’s not the only person. Other electronics printer manufacturers will work towards PCB printing features, including Voxel8, Voltera, Chemcubed and botfactory. A few of these solutions integrate functions like machine eyesight and pick-and-place, allowing for the automatic assembly of circuit boards.
In Nano Dimension’s personal backyard, there are a variety of materials and inkjetting experts as well, including Stratasys, XJet and HP, all of which may have their own electronics printing technologies up their sleeves. HP, for instance, has already demonstrated the ability to 3D print strain sensors into nylon components directly.
The competition may be steep for all of the players, but for ordinary people, this means that 3D printing is continuing to evolve.