Manufacturing next-generation electronics like they are T-Shirts
ygoliya.medium.com
ygoliya.medium.com
I would think there are different electrical characteristics to account for - as the article alludes to, but also strength of bond to the substrate (esp for components like connectors).
As a production process it has some uses, but mainly for larger, more flexible stuff. LED clothing, maybe?
Might not work if you put component pins through via holes. Plated through holes have enough hard metal to withstand that. Conductive ink, maybe not.
As usual, making your own boards is more trouble than it's worth. Board making services are cheap and all the DIY processes produce an inferior product to even low-end board services.
The US has PCB manufacturers, but they are WAY more expensive.
So far I've only seen the antennas printable but not the transistor logic.
In that Era the state of the art was multiple layers of ceramic substrate. Modern techniques like Volterra have allow you to print the ink and insulation. No reason it can't also print resistors. You can have a ten layer single sided board, printed in your lab in an afternoon. My only issue with it is the relatively poor conductivity of the conductive ink. But that will be solved eventually.
I'd be surprised if an inkjet can't get higher resolution than screenprinting. Doesn't solve the transistor issue the OP was asking about though.
It's almost possible to inkjet print circuitry with transistors in research applications; see [1]. 20 micrometer resolution is relatively easy, so a WiFi/BT or NFC antenna (~millimeter scale) is very possible. I agree, the tricky bit is making (a) enough transistors to for the radio at (b) sufficiently high frequencies. As in [1], inkjet-printed transistor circuits have at most ~10 transistors as of yet (and NFC chips, with > 512 bit memory, need at least hundreds if not thousands). According to [2], inkjet printed organic transistors are in the range of MHz frequencies; NFC (~13 MHz) may be possible; WiFi (~2.2 GHz) may not be for a while yet.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129506 [2] https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.6b06041
There are several other printing methods that are faster and more precise - like roll-to-roll gravure, flexo or offset printing. There’s a lot of innovation happening in this space to get very small features printed extremely fast.