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Focused microwaves allow 3D printers to fuse circuits onto almost anything

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Re: Focused microwaves allow 3D printers to fuse circuits onto almost anything

#21
> The Meta-NFS device concentrates microwave energy into a zone smaller than 200 micrometers, about the width of a human hair, enabling electronics to be printed onto bone, tissue, and living plants

> The Meta-NFS works by heating from within the deposited material itself. A conventional transmission-line microwave applicator

I can't think of any sci-fi plot that anticipated this. Heating a material from within to apply on to sensitive mediums like skin tissue potentially opening applications that go beyond nano-suit imaginations.

Re: Focused microwaves allow 3D printers to fuse circuits onto almost anything

#24
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are produced by companies that specialise in producing ICs. They can be placed manually or automated.

If you can print small enough with this technology I'm pretty sure you can make transistors - sort of 1980 era transistors, not very dense, but if you are printing bulk materials you can build in 3D rather than 2D, make interesting numbers of transistors, cpus in everything!

Home-printed 80s transistors would unlock a lot of analog-style guitar pedals. :D

Re: Focused microwaves allow 3D printers to fuse circuits onto almost anything

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Components are pretty easily done via pick-and-place, which was just demonstrated on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGZ0qpPN1uk once one can make traces in 3D as part of a case/shell/frame/structure things get _very_ interesting --- consider that one electronics designer actually worked up a 3D CAD system: https://dune3d.org/ just for making 3D printed enclosures: >My primary use case for 3D CAD is designing…

Though, I generally like the idea of circuit traces embedded directly in mechanical design of a product, I suppose this would make devices completely and utterly non-repairable. Not that there's something new in this, but imagine, debugging a 3d volumetric circuit, where chips and discrete components baked solid into medium? And I also wonder, where such super high level of integration would be necessary, other than…

Who needs repairability when you can just print a new one?

Re: Focused microwaves allow 3D printers to fuse circuits onto almost anything

#27
post #2

The article reads like they are talking about the traces. What about components like surface mount resistors, IC's, etc? The examples I noticed were things like antennas, grids, a microspring. I didn't see anything resembling a full circuit.

I appreciate all the replies but they all seem to involve making circuit connections by applying heat. If you have to reflow the whole assembly, then you've lost the big advantage they pitch from being able to drop traces on delicate materials without significantly heating them. e.g. If you want to print a circuit on a living bone, you can't reflow that whole creature who the bone belongs to, without killing it.

I'm not clear if their technique works for the junction of one metal trace onto something like a metal pin of an IC? Would heat conduct through to the rest of the pin, potentially damaging the surrounding tissue or whatever it's mounted atop? Did they study heating up highly conductive junctions and how well they can control how far the heat travels while still obtaining a good "weld"? I guess the idea might be they sort of "spot weld" the trace to the pin very quickly with high heat? I don't know, maybe instead of one "weld" they could do clusters of several very small ones at staggered time intervals to limit the maximum heat absorbed by surrounding material?

That's without even getting into adhesives, etc. to hold the components in place against those delicate materials before (and potentially after, depending on trace strength) they are soldered.

They say they built a circuit, but from what I can tell from my brief skim all they really did was lay down traces on exotic substrates, with the real circuitry connected to it but mounted somewhere else. I'm genuinely eager for someone to point out a counterexample.

Thanks!

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