However, industry has been showing interest in the technique over the last few years and it has been adopted by some for prototyping purposes, if not for production.
So far, 3D printing has not embraced the electronics industry, with the exception of producing things like enclosures. But there are now suggestions that the technique could be applied to the creation of PCBs.
While 3D printing an enclosure is a relatively simple process – it only needs one material – a PCB is another matter. The basic requirement for a PCB is for two materials – one to act as a substrate and another to provide conductivity – but it would probably need more.
I was discussing this with a chum from the electronics industry the other day and he used the word ‘box’, but his context was ‘thinking outside the box’. In his opinion, 3D printing presents an opportunity for the electronics world, but it requires people to move beyond thinking about PCBs being planar.
If you could 3D print a PCB – and there is no immediate evidence that you can – then it opens a whole new avenue of product design. Products need not be constrained by a planar PCB; rather, the product could be the board. And, according to my chum, it only needs a pick and place machine – sophisticated, however – working in combination with the 3D printer to enable this.
If you think about it, this makes sense. As you create layers of substrate, you can put down things like passives, then embed them with further layers of substrate before placing the larger components on the surface. Layers can be connected with vias, just like in traditional multilayer PCBs. And the latest 3D printers have the ability to handle multiple materials, which would bring further flexibility.
But one of the big questions is whether the materials compatible with a 3D printing process would have the performance required for a PCB?
