Rabbit Proto, Integrated 3D Printed Circuitry

[mkapras]

There is a very, very, veeeeeery long distance to go from basically printing wiring to a smartphone, there is a reason why semiconductor factories are enormous facilities costing billions of dollars.

CaptainObvious - do you consider yourself a pessimist or a realist? ;-)

[CaptainObvious]

CaptainObvious - do you consider yourself a pessimist or a realist? ;-)

Realist, if you see all the processes involved in integrated circuit manufacturing you'd understand why the idea of desktop 3D printer that can create anything, from a coffee mug to a smartphone is not a realistic one.

It's one thing to create conductive traces on a substrate, a very trivial one thing actually, but actual circuitry of the size and sophistication requiered for a microprocessor or a memory chip? I don't see it.
I think crude and bulky logical circuits are not impossible, like printing a dozen or so logic gates on a 1cm^2 area, that could be done I guess. But when you get down to the technology needed to print millions upon millions of transistors and logic gates in the same spot, with a machine that needs to also do all the other threedeeprintee stuff, now way Jose; just think of the ultra clean environment needed to create chips, the mind bogglingly pure crystals needed for semiconductors, how do you create such an environment inside a 3D printer that hypothetically would seat in the desktop of your average Joe? A speck of dust can ruin a chip after all.

Then how would you print a battery for the phone? it's an electrochemical device, a metallic electrode and a liquid (or semiliquid) electrolite; the printer would need to be stocked up with half the periodic table of elements too, in fact it would have to be something like a molecular manipulator rather than what we think of as a 3D printer.

At best I can envision a future were there would be molecular assemblers, using self replicating chemistry to in fact create something not very different from a living thing, after all we see every day the results of very sophisticated organic machinery building the most amazing structures, but it wouldn't be anything like the technology we use today.

[alex-rabbit]

Rabbit Proto founder here, and I can give you some background elements about what led us to think that this particular concept was the best to get out there right now from a technology standpoint.

The project started actually looking at bringing a prototyping platform for Printed Electronics (let's call this PE). PE is huge both on the research side (printed microprocessors are happening since 2011) and the industry side. Chemical companies are massively investing in R&D for this as they see two things, a generalization of the use of this technology for massive production of touch panels & solar panels among for example as well as a continuing number of consumer electronic devices (high grossing applications) that take advantage of the unique properties of functional inks.

What we found very interesting and a potential game changer was the second application. We talked to dozens of people to confirm that this was actually a need and we started looking for existing solutions, and to our surprise there was not really anything out there at the time. So we started experimenting with 3D printing of plastics and silver filled silicone RTV in April 2012 and that was the beginning of what would become Rabbit Proto. Silver was great in terms of conductivity but super expensive and in the absence of a pick and place system we had to put components by hand inside our 3d printed objects and then lay down the trace. So we went through a reduction exercise and we realized that materials like conductive graphite paste could avoid the use of components if we limited ourself at first the printing of capacitive sensors. Our approach right now is to go to more complex 3D printed geometries (anatomically correct for example) with embedded sensing and interactivity using the conductive material. If new materials were to be found to be useful in the future, the syringe would allow users to be able to switch between multiple functional materials.

Lastly instead of designing a $100 000 machine, we chose the RepRap way and thought that progressively open-sourcing it would be a nice way to get the project a community of application developers and a good way to give back to the community that gave us the machines and electronics we are using.

Hope this helps, and we love feedback and suggestions!

Hopes this clarifies things!