Weaving A Digital Thread For Design And Manufacture Of Additive Electronics


Additive manufacturing has been around electronics since thick-film, screened hybrids came on the scene more than 30 years ago. And while those never quite went away, they never gained the prominence we all expected alongside the more traditional laminated, subtractive-etched PCBs. Today, emerging technologies are bringing a resurgence in additive manufacturing, also known as printed electro... » read more

Printing Grids In 3D


Those of you who attended the 2011 Pointwise User Group Meeting may remember that our company president, John Chawner, mentioned during his closing statements how nice it would be to have the ability to print your grids in 3D. That was more than just a dreamy, "what if" statement. It is a reality! Almost. A little history 3D-printed F-16 forward fuselage. I have always been fascinat... » read more

Research Bits: March 21


Micropatterning with sugar A scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) discovered a transfer printing process that can deposit microcircuit patterns on curved and textured surfaces using sugar candy. Transfer printing methods, such as flexible tapes, are often used for surfaces that are difficult to directly print on. But they have difficulty with conforming to ... » read more

Unknowns And Challenges In Advanced Packaging


Dick Otte, CEO of Promex Industries, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about unknowns in material properties, the impact on bonding, and why environmental factors are so important in complex heterogeneous packages. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Companies have been designing heterogeneous chips to take advantage of specific applications or use cases, but th... » read more

Research Bits: Jan. 17


Ionic circuit for neural nets Researchers at Harvard University and DNA Script developed an ionic circuit comprising hundreds of ionic transistors for neural net computing. While ions in water move slower than electrons in semiconductors, the team noted that the diversity of ionic species with different physical and chemical properties could be harnessed for more diverse information process... » read more

New Material for Printing At the Nanoscale, Strong & Light (Stanford/Northwestern)


A new technical paper titled "Mechanical nanolattices printed using nanocluster-based photoresists" was published by researchers at Stanford University and Northwestern University. The researchers have developed a new material for nanoscale 3D printing to be used for drones, microelectronics and satellites, demonstrating that "the new material is able to absorb twice as much energy than othe... » read more

Research Bits: March 1


Large-scale phased array Researchers at Princeton University developed a large-scale high-frequency antenna array using thin-film materials. “To achieve these large dimensions, people have tried discrete integration of hundreds of little microchips. But that’s not practical — it’s not low-cost, it’s not reliable, it’s not scalable on a wireless systems level,” said senior stud... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 25


Nanoscale 3D optics Researchers at Rice University and University of Houston are using 3D printing to build nanostructures of silica for micro-scale electronic, mechanical, and photonic devices. “It’s very tough to make complicated, three-dimensional geometries with traditional photolithography techniques,” said Jun Lou, a professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice. �... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 18


3D printed custom wearables Researchers from the University of Arizona created a 3D printed wearable that can operate continuously through wireless power to track body temperature and muscle deformation during exercise. Based on 3D body scans of the wearer, the medical-grade 'biosymbiotic device' can be custom printed to conform to a user's skin without the need for adhesives, which can irr... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Dec. 21


Tiny electronic fountain pens Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Taiyuan University of Technology have developed what resembles a tiny electronic fountain pen, a technology that can pattern and deposit small structures on surfaces. The system from KIT and Taiyuan University is actually a high-precision tabletop microplotter, which is used to print or deposit materials for printed e... » read more

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