DragonFly LDM – Lights-Out Digital Manufacturing System (3D Electronics Printer) | Hacker News Reader

DragonFly LDM – Lights-Out Digital Manufacturing System (3D Electronics Printer)

nano-di.com

41 pointspeter_d_sherman8 comments

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>"The DragonFly LDM™ is fitted with two printheads, one for

nano-Silver conductive ink

and the other for

dielectric polymer ink.

This set-up allows the DragonFly LDM™ to concurrently print with both advanced inks in a single print job."

Conductive ink + dielectric ink = the ability to print semiconductors and other electronic circuits...

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

So 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.

This 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).

> Conductive ink + dielectric ink = the ability to print semiconductors and other electronic circuits...

Not semiconductors. This is basically a PCB printer.

Fair enough! I stand corrected! <g>

But I am on a quest to find actual transistor printing... oh well, someday! <g>

This looks very interesting, but they don't seem to have the minimum line / space widths anywhere.

Trace/space width: 100um/125um

Build volume: 200x200x3mm

Accuracy: 1um

Conductor: silver nanoparticle ink (can't find quantitative conductivity, but similar silver inks often reach a very respectable ≈1e-5 ohm-cm after heating)

Insulator (dielectric): polymer, properties similar to FR4 (dielectric constant ≈3)

The system is similar to the very impressive PolyJet 3D printers [2] (which can't print conductors yet, but can do multiple materials and colors). The DragonFly layer thickness isn't mentioned, but by analogy with the PolyJet, is probably variable down to 10um or so.

The information's in the DragonFly system brochure downloadable from [1] with contact information.

[1] https://www.nano-di.com/nano-dimension-papers-ebooks [2] https://www.stratasys.com/polyjet-technology

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