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Comment by blueblisters | Hacker News Reader

> To increase the printing resolution, the additive manufacturing industry may need to devise a completely new printing process. Currently, inkjet 3D printing provides among the highest resolution features for 3D printing PCBs, but it remains to be seen if this process can be improved to provide resolution less than 1 micron.The future of 3D printing integrated circuits will likely adapt a photolithography process or functional self-assembly process to produce integrated circuits with competitive resolution.

I thought the whole appeal of 3D printing is tool-less manufacturing. Photolithography typically involves using photomasks, which is not exactly suitable for prototyping or low-volume production.

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There's been lots of progress on DIY/academic maskless photolithography by using TI digital micromirror devices from projectors to reflect light into a microscope for exposing photoresist. They even sell a UV version that is just for this purpose (maskless light manipulation in general). As usual, the bigger issue is alignment between steps and the etchants.

Still don't know what it has to do with 3d printing, except the article sounds like GPT3 mindlessly connecting lithographic resin 3d printers and semiconductor photolithography, with a Google Scholar search on those terms as a data set.

formlabs released a repo to use their old model printer (form 1 / 1+) to do stuff along these lines. i've tested it as far as exposing a photoresist (after forking and fixing some issues) and it is definitely a cool thing to not have intermediate steps like transparencies or toner transfer.

> maskless photolithography by using TI digital micromirror devices from projectors to reflect light into a microscope

I just looked this up. It's incredible that maskless photolithography is even possible. Are these devices used in any high volume processes for manufacturing PCBs, for example?

The more common maskless route is laser direct write. That is capable to micron level dimensions, and multicolor variants have been proposed to allow submicron.

Ebeam direct write is capable to NM level features. Just slow.

http://www.periodicstructures.com/

Has some neat papers on this.

Lithographic printers already exist and are now cheap. You are likely reading this comment through a photomask right now :)

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