[HN Gopher] A step toward fully 3D-printed active electronics
___________________________________________________________________
A step toward fully 3D-printed active electronics
Author : gmays
Score : 180 points
Date : 2024-10-21 01:17 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| jayyhu wrote:
| Reading the article, it looks like so far they only have a
| working resettable fuse (a passive device), and only hypothesize
| that a transistor was possible with the copper-infused PLA
| filament. So no actual working active electronics.
|
| And from the paper linked in the article[1], it seems the actual
| breakthrough is the discovery that copper-infused PLA filament
| exhibits a PTC-effect, which is noteworthy, but definitely not
| "3D-Printed Active Electronics" newsworthy.
|
| [1]
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17452759.2024.2...
| greenavocado wrote:
| > So no actual working active electronics.
|
| Oh so this is another scam like the MIT Food Computer. At this
| point I assume everything coming out of MIT is a scam until
| independently validated by disinterested third parties
| frognumber wrote:
| This shouldn't be a downvote or flag. It's a serious problem,
| especially at elite institutions, and especially at MIT and
| Stanford.
|
| It's also not out-of-line with what credible sources observe:
|
| https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-
| hea...
|
| I'm affiliated with MIT, and have been for the vast majority
| of my life, including at points in fairly senior roles. If
| you shut people out pointing problems, it will never get
| better.
|
| There's an incredible urge to defend elite academic
| institutions, but it's not in the interest of those
| institutions. Remember your civics class (patriots criticize
| their government institutions).
|
| The only way I see this fixed involves a period where MIT is
| viewed like a used car salesman in the public eye for at
| least enough years to cause enough pain to lead to reform.
| The endowment is big enough it'll do fine in the end. If it
| keeps sliding to fraud, it won't.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| usually even these academia hype pieces have some grain of
| utility but this one was so incomprehensibly bad that i was
| genuinely confused if i'm reading it incorrectly. what the
| hell?
| IanCal wrote:
| Hang on, can you explain why this is passive and not active?
|
| > Harnessing the described phenomenon, we created the first
| semiconductor-free active electronic devices fully 3D printed
| via material extrusion. We demonstrate this breakthrough
| through the implementation of monolithically 3D-printed logic
| gates.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| They've created a Polymeric Positive Temperature Coefficient
| (PPTC) device. As it heats up the resistance gets very high
| very abruptly.
|
| While it is non-linear, diodes are also considered passive
| devices[2], as active is taken to mean _electrical_ control
| of current flow.
|
| In this case one could induce current control through thermal
| means, ie an adjacent heating element, and if you potted that
| in a box I guess you could argue the box is an active device.
| But not the PPTC itself.
|
| [1]: https://m.littelfuse.com/~/media/electronics/technical_p
| aper...
|
| [2]: https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/t
| ext/...
| amelius wrote:
| > active is taken to mean electrical control of current
| flow
|
| Is a transformer an active device? Asking because current
| in one loop can control current in the other loop.
|
| From there, are two copper wires an active device?
| adrian_b wrote:
| The current in one transformer loop does not control the
| current in the other loop.
|
| The power from one loop is transferred into the other,
| there is no control. The same for two copper wires.
|
| "Control" means that you can determine the value of the
| power in some circuit by consuming less power to do this.
| If you have to use the same power, not less, then you are
| the provider of power, not someone in control, i.e. this
| is the difference between bosses and the workers
| commanded by them. The bosses do not lift heavy parcels
| themselves, they order to some worker to do that.
|
| A device that apparently looks like a transformer but it
| is an active device is the magnetic amplifier. There are
| 2 differences from a transformer, the magnetic core is
| saturable during normal operation (any magnetic core is
| saturable at a high enough magnetic field, but when that
| happens in a transformer this means that the transformer
| has failed, which leads to overcurrents that would
| destroy the equipment unless a protection is triggered),
| and the second difference is that the control coil has a
| very high number of turns, so that a very small current
| can saturate the magnetic core.
|
| In a magnetic amplifier, the output coil is inserted in
| an AC circuit where the power must be controlled. When
| the core is not saturated, the impedance of the coil is
| high and the output AC current is low. When the core is
| saturated, the impedance of the coil is low and the
| output AC current is high. Whether the magnetic core is
| saturated or not is controlled with a very small current
| and power on the control coil, which makes this an active
| device.
|
| Magnetic amplifiers have been heavily used during WWII,
| especially by the Germans, who had improved them, and
| they continued to be used for a few decades after the end
| of WWII, when USA had captured the German technology,
| because of their very high reliability, until the
| transistor amplifiers have become reliable enough.
| amelius wrote:
| > The current in one transformer loop does not control
| the current in the other loop.
|
| You are right about the power, but the current in one
| loop __does__ control the current in the other loop.
| adrian_b wrote:
| You use "control" in the wide sense of "dependency", i.e.
| if two quantities are constrained by an equation, you say
| that one quantity controls the other, only because their
| values are not independent (which means that fixing the
| value of anyone of the two quantities also determines the
| value of the other quantity).
|
| According to your usage, the voltage on a resistor is
| controlled by its current, because the voltage is
| proportional with the current (by the resistance of the
| resistor), and also the current is controlled by the
| voltage, because the current is proportional with the
| voltage (by the conductance of the resistor), exactly
| like in a transformer the input and output currents and
| voltages are bound by proportionality relationships.
|
| It is true that this meaning of "control" is encountered
| in speech, but in engineering and physics "control" has a
| precise meaning, more restricted that how you use it.
|
| In the engineering use of "control", it is always
| possible to distinguish which is the controller and which
| is the controlled in a control relationship.
|
| When "control" is used like you use it, the "control"
| relationship is bidirectional and you cannot say which is
| the controller and which is the controlled, e.g. between
| the primary loop and the secondary loop of the
| transformer, or between the current and the voltage
| through a resistor.
|
| For "control" in the engineering sense, unidirectionality
| is an essential property. Real control devices have some
| internal feedbacks that make them not completely
| unidirectional, but this is considered a defect and
| serious efforts are done to improve the unidirectionality
| of the control devices. A device with total feedback like
| a transformer cannot be used to implement any of the
| known control methods, i.e. you cannot make amplifiers or
| oscillators or logic gates with it.
| amelius wrote:
| But when electrical power is used to drive a simple DC
| motor, then that power "controls" the speed of that
| motor. When the power is removed and the motor keeps
| turning (by e.g. a flywheel) then the power is delivered
| back to the input. So in that example there is
| bidirectionality, where you still "control" the speed of
| the motor.
| adrian_b wrote:
| As I have said, some people, including you, are using the
| word "control" in this wider sense, where it is
| synonymous with "dependency".
|
| Nevertheless, using "control" with this meaning in any
| engineering text would be a mistake, because there
| "control" must be used in its strict sense, to avoid
| confusions.
|
| In any system there are many dependency relationships,
| corresponding to all the equations that are applicable to
| that system, but much fewer control relationships. The
| control relationships are quite important for the
| understanding of the system, so they must be identified
| clearly in a distinct way from other dependencies.
|
| Etymologically, the right sense of "control" is the
| strict sense, because it has never been applied to a
| bidirectional relationship like that between the
| quantities connected by an equation, but it originally
| referred to a unidirectional relationship, between a
| dominant party, the controller, and a subordinate entity,
| the controlled, whose accounts were checked by the
| controller.
|
| In proper engineering terms it is not the source of power
| which controls the speed of a motor, but the device that
| is used to vary the amount of that power. When there is
| no device to vary the input power, a DC motor works like
| a transformer, the input voltage is proportional with the
| output rotational speed and the input current is
| proportional with the output torque. The input quantities
| and the output quantities are dependent, so in the wide
| meaning of "control" you can say equally well that the
| input electric power is controlled by the output
| mechanical power or that the output mechanical power is
| controlled by the input electrical power. However the use
| of this phrases does not provide any advantage instead of
| just saying that you have a system of 2 equations that
| connect the 2 input quantities and the 2 output
| quantities, so given an appropriate pair of quantities
| the other 2 are provided by the equations. On the other
| hand, saying for instance that the motor speed can be
| controlled by the excitation current of the motor
| provides useful information by using the word "control",
| because it is implied that this method of varying the
| motor speed requires only a small power in comparison
| with the output power.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| We say a changing current in one coil of a transformer
| _induces_ a current in the other coil. It does not
| _control_ the current of the other coil.
|
| Any induced current is superimposed on top of whatever is
| already there on the other side. This is different from
| controlling the current.
|
| For example, you couldn't block DC current passing
| through the secondary side regardless what you did on the
| primary side.
| qwery wrote:
| But transformers _don 't_ do that. The electricity you
| put in one winding "comes out" on an/the other,
| _transformed_ -- there isn 't one current controlling
| another, there's just one current[0].
|
| [0] _very loosely speaking_ , also I am not a doctor
| adrian_b wrote:
| Unlike a device with positive temperature coefficient, the
| NTC thermistors (negative temperature coefficient) can be
| used by themselves as active devices that provide a
| negative resistance, which can be used to make amplifiers
| and oscillators, exactly like with any other diodes with
| negative resistance, e.g. tunnel diodes, IMPATT diodes,
| Gunn diodes, Shockley diodes, diacs and so on.
|
| Nevertheless, I do not think that anyone has ever made
| amplifiers or oscillators with thermistors, because unlike
| the diodes where the negative resistance has electrical
| causes, the inertia of the heat transfer in thermistors
| makes the achievable upper limit for the amplified
| frequencies very low, typically under 1 Hz.
|
| A device with positive temperature coefficient could be
| used as an amplifier or as a switch (like a relay) only
| together with a separate heater, as you say.
| notjulianjaynes wrote:
| I have seen old organs which used solid state VCOs that
| also had an incandescent lightbulb near the circuit
| boards to help maintain a stable temperature, and had
| thought they must use a thermistor although I seem to be
| mistaken as I can't find much information about that.
|
| I did find this however:
|
| https://northcoastsynthesis.com/news/temperature-
| compensatio...
| IanCal wrote:
| > as active is taken to mean electrical control of current
| flow.
|
| Does the building of logic gates controlling a motor not
| show electrical control of current flow?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Well, it is just "a step."
|
| Whether or not it is newsworthy... eh, I mean, what is MIT
| News? A campus newspaper? I'm pretty sure we had articles on
| particularly big games of capture the flag in mine.
| jayyhu wrote:
| It looks like the editors have amended the title of their
| article since this was initially posted. The original title
| was just "3D-printed Active Electronics"
| notjulianjaynes wrote:
| What seems cool about this to me is that they seem to have
| done it with a plain old FDM printer and copper impregnated
| PLA. The devices are fairly large (mm scale) so presumably
| anyone with a $200 ender and the correct filament could print
| these.
|
| I am able to find copper PLA for sale too, although I'm not
| positive it is what was used in the experiment, and it's kind
| of pricey (~ $100/kg).
| atoav wrote:
| Not to be that guy, but this is a typical situation as it
| occurs a thousand times per week:
|
| 1. Scientists make minor progress as part of a multi-year
| effort, release a paper, paper features overly optimistic
| outlook to get future funding
|
| 2. Institute marketing department both hypes it up and dumbs it
| down a little
|
| 3. Popular science press picks it up and both hypes it up and
| dumbs it down a little more
|
| 4. Scientific literate readers read it and complain
|
| TL;DR: Nothing new under the sun
| jayyhu wrote:
| I want to clarify that they actually did build a transistor-
| like device, and not just hypothesize about it. I missed
| section 3.2 when I initially skimmed the paper, which
| demonstrates and shows the results of a working "transistor".
|
| Unfortunately I can't edit my original post, so apologies for
| causing any confusion.
| netrap wrote:
| This image shows logic gates they made:
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/cms/asset/5043deae-e79e-45fc-
| bb7...
| nativeit wrote:
| It's cool for tinkering, and I think there are lots of
| potential use-cases for conductive filaments and printing in
| electronics, but I don't think transistors are necessary.
| Silicon crystal development is really already a sort of
| "additive manufacturing", and I'm not sure what purpose would
| be served by re-inventing a method that would be starting so
| far behind in terms of scale, precision, and cost in relation
| to traditional semiconductor production (anyway, I assume
| this idea is broadly for learning/experimentation/the lols,
| rather than some earnest aspiration for using metal-bearing
| printer filaments to produce active components).
| westurner wrote:
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40759133 :
|
| > _In addition to nanolithography and nanoassembly, there is 3d
| printing with graphene._
|
| And conductive aerogels, and carbon nanotube production at
| scale
|
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41210021 :
|
| > _There 's already conductive graphene 3d printing filament
| (and far less conductive graphene). Looks like 0.8ohm*cm may be
| the least resistive graphene filament available:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=graphene+3d+printer+filament...
| _
|
| > _Are there yet CNT or Twisted SWCNT Twisted Single-Walled
| Carbon Nanotube substitutes for copper wiring?_
|
| Aren't there carbon nanotube superconducting cables?
|
| Instead of copper, there are plastic waveguides
| lmpdev wrote:
| I thought resettable fuses were already polymer based?
|
| PPTCs are just plastic and metal with no semiconductors afaik
|
| Is this actually an MIT article?
| curtisf wrote:
| From the paper,
|
| > This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first report of
| fully 3D-printed resettable fuses.
|
| I think unique the contribution is that the entire circuit --
| active and passive -- can be made with this one single
| material. Normally, you need to use many different materials
| and chemical baths to make a circuit with active components,
| but using this metal-polymer mix, you can _just_ deposit the
| metal and you are finished.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >"They saw an interesting phenomenon in the material they were
| using, a polymer filament doped with copper nanoparticles.
|
| If they passed a
|
| _large amount of electric current into the material, it would
| exhibit a huge spike in resistance_
|
| but would return to its original level shortly after the current
| flow stopped."
|
| This is interesting -- _large amounts of current being associated
| with increased resistance_...
|
| I have never seen or read about something like that with respect
| to other electronic components or systems.
|
| It would be an interesting experiment to see if this effect could
| be simulated, and if so, under what conditions, in non-
| nanoparticle standard regular-sized electrical components...
|
| I'm guessing (but not knowing!) that you'd you'd need a very high
| amount of current (like something from a car battery), but at a
| very low voltage, like maybe 0.1 or 0.01 volts (or less), and
| maybe like a very thin long wire made of some mostly-conducitive
| material, and then maybe something at some scale or low voltage
| if the experimenter was lucky...
|
| Anyway, large current associated with increased resistance...
| I've never heard of that one before, except I suppose if the
| current heats the electrical path so much that it destroys it...
| which would be different for different materials, voltages,
| cross-section of conductors, temperatures, etc., etc.
|
| I'd assume that wouldn't happen at the nanoscale and/or in a
| switching semiconductor... but perhaps I might be wrong on some
| level...
| elictronic wrote:
| Lightbulbs? High amount of current increases resistance.
| torginus wrote:
| _large amount of electric current into the material, it would
| exhibit a huge spike in resistance_
|
| considering the low melting point of these 3d printing
| plastics, they probably melted the wire.
| tlb wrote:
| PTC (positive temperature coefficient) thermistors do that.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermistor.
|
| They're used as auto-resetting fuses in many devices.
| reader9274 wrote:
| This is like posting "Landing on Mars" and all you did was catch
| a reusable rocket.
| dools wrote:
| I think the "step towards being an inter planetary species" as
| a result of catching a re-usable rocket might have merit in
| that it makes construction of things in outer space easier
| (although that's probably a charitable interpretation of the
| statement).
|
| My take on the Spacex is Mars habitation project is that Musk
| will put a bunch of edgelords on Mars, and then not really be
| able to follow up with adequate supply lines and the operation
| will be offline for a hundred years or so while the climate
| settles down. The people who live on Mars will then have been
| there alone for a century and in the 2100s we will send a
| follow up mission with hilarious consequences.
| peepeepoopoo87 wrote:
| Thunderf00t, is that you?
| dools wrote:
| Haha I had never heard of that dude, but I like the look of
| his content thanks!
|
| BTW you can tell I'm not Thunderf00t because he says that
| "the taxpayer" paid $3 billion. I would never use "taxpayer
| funding" language, I would only ever call it public money
| (because Treasury creates money when it spends).
| exe34 wrote:
| by that logic tax should be zero?
| dools wrote:
| Not really, if there was no tax there would be no money.
|
| The most succinct way that I have found to express the
| relationship between taxation and spending is that
| spending at the federal level is constrained by aggregate
| spending this year, not tax receipts last year.
| baq wrote:
| taxes are how you don't have inflation.
|
| the government can also destroy money about as easily as
| it creates it, too. it isn't a politically (and usually
| economically) desirable thing to do. when it's done, it's
| usually via replacing the whole currency wholesale (e.g.
| brazilian real).
| exe34 wrote:
| > taxes are how you don't have inflation.
|
| or you know, don't print trillions to bail out failed
| banks.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| You don't need to be thunderfoot to understand that
| pretending you will start to colonize mars in the next
| years lies somewhere between daydreaming and scamming.
|
| Although I like when thunderfoot compare the archives of
| what musk said with what actually happened
| peepeepoopoo87 wrote:
| The punchline is that everyone here thought being called
| "thunderf00t" was a compliment, even though I meant it as
| an example of someone who is consistently proven wrong at
| every turn for casting shade on Musk's tech ambitions. It
| seems HN's original techno-optimist hacker ethos is dead
| in the grave.
| dools wrote:
| Or is the REAL punchline the fact that Musk has optimised
| his entire empire to tap into the hacker ethos/ideals as
| the world's biggest pump n dump scheme? He seems to just
| do things that have the biggest wow factor because growth
| stocks need to keep growing otherwise there is no point
| in owning them.
| latexr wrote:
| He won't put anyone living on Mars. And even if he did, they
| wouldn't last that long.
|
| https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-
| will...
|
| https://www.acityonmars.com/
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| That first article is just nonsense. The south pole can't
| support life? It's been supporting humans for half a
| century. Can't protect against radiation? Live underground
| like Hamas did. Have to wait 9 months for food? We do that
| on Earth too - if you're hungry, call a farmer and ask him
| to plant some food then come back in a year or two when
| it's harvested. We solve that problem by pipelining it,
| just as you would on Mars.
| latexr wrote:
| The South Pole hasn't been "supporting humans", we forced
| ourselves in there and survive _despite the conditions_
| in an environment that is harsh but even so considerably
| more hospitable than Mars.
|
| All your other solutions are hand-wavey. Sure, let's
| "just live underground" as if that's just as easy as
| pitching a tent. And who on Earth is surviving nine
| months without any food? You're talking as if Mars is
| just turning right on Albuquerque.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Musk hasn't to my knowledge financed any architectural design
| projects for a long-term livable Mars habitat that can
| sustain itself without constant inputs from Earth.
|
| I suspect this is because the most casual analysis reveals
| incredible difficulties - the structures would have to be
| buried under a few meters of regolith to avoid constant
| radiation burn, and the ration of human living space to plant
| growing space (for food) would have to be about 1:6 I'd
| guess. The amount of material required to build such a
| structure for 100 humans? Let alone maintenance, etc.
|
| If realistic plans were actually presented no doubt everyone
| would start laughing, which is why we haven't seen any mock-
| ups, VR models, etc.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They're working on getting the issue of transport sorted
| out first because the entire architecture is shaped by the
| constraints and requirements of your transport system. The
| amount of mass you can land, the energy needed for ISRU and
| so on.
|
| HN just has forgotten its hacker roots and instead gets off
| to unconstructively sitting back and criticizing with
| shallow gotchas.
| resonious wrote:
| It's a step towards landing on Mars. They aren't even claiming
| to have landed.
| reader9274 wrote:
| Musk claimed we would be on Mars in 2022 so...
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/27/elon-
| musk...
| cladopa wrote:
| "all you did was making rockets 10x cheaper", so you have plans
| for making them 100x to 1000x? That has nothing to do with
| Mars!
| mikewarot wrote:
| Long, long ago, Tunnel Diodes were going to usher in an era of
| ultra-fast computing because their negative resistance region
| allowed for current gain in the simple 2 pin device.
|
| It didn't work out for most of it, but does show that you can do
| logic without transistors.
|
| Think of these as incredibly slow negative resistance devices.
| Computing with them might be possible, barely. But sometimes
| that's all you need.
| AyyEye wrote:
| They arent dead!
|
| Diy 8ghz (sampling) oscilloscope with tunneling diodes
| https://hackaday.io/project/167292-8-ghz-sampling-oscillosco...
| torginus wrote:
| While mentally stimulating, this sounds practically not very
| useful. They're using a copper-doped polymer for printing, which
| probably has way worse properties anything we make PCB traces out
| of.
|
| And the 3D part is gimmicky. We have built electronic systems of
| monstrous complexity just with planar printers.
|
| Wake me up when someone build a system that can reliably make
| PCBs at home, with placing components, and doesn't cost an arm
| and a leg, and is cheap and easy to run.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| It would be nice to pattern diodes and semiconductors on PCB
| without components as follows: etch circuit layout of a copper
| layer, mask the traces so they don't oxidize, then heat the PCB
| to have unmasked copper turn into Cu2O (cuprous oxide, a
| semiconductor).
|
| Anyone seriously attempting this should make sure they
| understand solid state physics, and at a minimum understand
| diffusion length of charge carriers and the different type of
| contacts: Ohmic, Schottky ( for example
| https://lampz.tugraz.at/~hadley/psd/lectures20/contacts.pdf )
|
| Performance will be horrible, but in some situations
| constructing and inspecting the device oneself can be paramount
| ( bootstrapping a secure computational platform, implementing
| formal verifier associated to a cryptocurrency, ... )
| LASR wrote:
| I am a fan of 3D printing. And I think you can probably get some
| circuit traces 3D printed for some niche applications.
|
| But active electronics? That's a huge stretch. But more
| importantly, the economics just doesn't make sense. Components
| already cost fractions of a cent. Small-run PCB prototyping is
| like <$25 for 5 boards or so.
|
| "A step toward..."
|
| Maybe. But why?
| seanthemon wrote:
| in places where you have a 3d printer but you don't have an
| active shipping line that can easily reach you. You can easily
| prototype things or build electronics.
|
| I also don't see this as the final result, printers could be
| purpose built for this to speed up production and make size
| smaller
| dsv3099i wrote:
| I suppose, but the 3D printer requires consumable inputs. So
| without active shipping that printer is going to have a very
| limited lifetime. There's always a corner case, like having
| to 3D print on Mars or something, but thats a niche of a
| niche.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Being able to just print some simple electronics components
| would massively simplify iteration and distribution of DIY
| things, especially as auto-filament changer systems become more
| accessible. As one example, being able to print a transistor or
| two and some traces would allow for making projects which embed
| something like an ESP32 dev board much more compact without
| having to wait for weeks for custom PCBs to ship from China.
|
| It's always weird to see people making arguments like this on a
| forum titled " _Hacker_ News "
| shultays wrote:
| I think it is valid to point of feasibility of something. For
| fast prototyping there are already breadboards or PCBs that
| you can just solder wires on, so it doesn't really help with
| tracing PCB lines. Printing transistors or other things that
| are good and compact enough to use, even for prototyping,
| seems to be indeed a stretch
| xondono wrote:
| > would massively simplify iteration
|
| I seriously doubt it.
|
| It's far easier and more effective (and economical) to have a
| bunch of jelly bean components around in stock.
|
| You're going to have a hard time 3D printing anything that
| can be solderable (either the 3D printer needs to work at
| high temperatures for DIY, or you need exotic solder that
| melts at low temperatures).
|
| If you have the need to fabricate quick PCBs for prototyping,
| you'll be better served by a cheap CNC machine and some
| copper foil blanks.
|
| The only real promise I see is that you might, in the very
| long future, be able to print custom multi-purpose devices,
| that integrate the characteristics of non critical
| electronics with mechanical elements, i.e. integrating NTCs
| on cases or fan supports,..
| gtzi wrote:
| Also you may want to take a look at https://www.botfactory.co
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Interesting idea but millimeter-scale logic doesn't really have
| much practical use in this day and age :) but it's s nice proof
| of concept.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Ah - but it's not just mm scale - it's 3d mm scale - sure it
| still needs to be smaller but if you can print into volumes
| rather than just on 2d planes things get interesting
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah, but a GPU would still be the scale of the pentagon :P
| jayd16 wrote:
| Even placing traces inside a print and then slotting in IC
| boards would be useful.
|
| Even at mm scale it changes the types of prints that can be
| done.
| sambeau wrote:
| It's refreshing to see this labeled as a "step toward".
| sebstefan wrote:
| Oh my god. We might get real life redstone.
| elif wrote:
| Hmmm not sure I see the advantages of 3d printing vs lithography.
|
| I mean, yes, technically, this approach could advance to catch up
| with lithography. In practice? Yes we are working toward smaller
| feature size in additive, but we are nowhere close to micro let
| alone nano scale.
|
| If the advantage is "hobbyists can do it" then I would say
| "hobbyists can eaglecad too"
|
| This seems like a detour or speedbump on our existing path toward
| atom level logic production.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| This is fascinating. I did thing a while back if it was possible
| to 3D print primitive electronics.
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