Major step toward fully 3D-printed active electronics

By fabricating semiconductor-free logic gates, which can be used to perform computation, researchers hope to streamline the manufacture of electronics | MIT

Active electronics — components that can control electrical signals — usually contain semiconductor devices that receive, store, and process information. These components, which must be made in a clean room, require advanced fabrication technology that is not widely available outside a few specialized manufacturing centers.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the lack of widespread semiconductor fabrication facilities was one cause of a worldwide electronics shortage, which drove up costs for consumers and had implications in everything from economic growth to national defense. The ability to 3D print an entire, active electronic device without the need for semiconductors could bring electronics fabrication to businesses, labs, and homes across the globe.

While this idea is still far off, MIT researchers have taken an important step in that direction by demonstrating fully 3D-printed resettable fuses, which are key components of active electronics that usually require semiconductors.

The researchers’ semiconductor-free devices, which they produced using standard 3D printing hardware and an inexpensive, biodegradable material, can perform the same switching functions as the semiconductor-based transistors used for processing operations in active electronics.

Although still far from achieving the performance of semiconductor transistors, the 3D-printed devices could be used for basic control operations like regulating the speed of an electric motor.

“This technology has real legs. While we cannot compete with silicon as a semiconductor, our idea is not to necessarily replace what is existing, but to push 3D printing technology into uncharted territory. In a nutshell, this is really about democratizing technology. This could allow anyone to create smart hardware far from traditional manufacturing centers,” says Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and senior author of a paper describing the devices, which appears in Virtual and Physical Prototyping.

He is joined on the paper by lead author Jorge Cañada, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student.