3D printing can be used to make devices quickly and at low cost, which is of particular value when testing different prototypes. The potential of this was explored in a Comment article that featured on the September 2018 cover of Nature Electronics (image, left). The article was from Martin Kaltenbrunner and colleagues, and was entitled ‘The importance of open and frugal labware’ (Nat. Electron. 1, 484–486; 2018). The authors argued that 3D printing could be used to make small- and medium-scale components for soft electronics and robotics, replacing dedicated workshops in many laboratories and providing a rapid turnover for the testing of different designs. They also noted the potential of the technology in open science, as scientists could share 3D designs, code and instructions.
Researchers have also recently expanded the capabilities of 3D printing to make devices with geometries that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with other methods. Most electronic devices require several different material types (conductors, semiconductors, dielectrics), but 3D printers are limited in the types of material they typically print. And even when an ink is optimized for a particular material functionality, the fabrication of the integrated device requires multiple printing, alignment and embedding steps. Work published in our April 2020 issue showed that a charge-programmed 3D printing technique can deposit multiple functional materials with arbitrary geometries in a single step. The paper was from Xiaoyu Zheng and colleagues, and was entitled ‘Charge-programmed three-dimensional printing for multi-material electronic devices’ (Nat. Electron. 3, 216–224; 2020).
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