3D printing and silicon photonics have combined in a rather exciting way this week. Researchers at MIT have engineered a novel 3D printing design on a single computer chip, officially the world's first chip-based 3D printer. The chip emits beams of light into a well of resin to fabricate designs, and will be iterated on to create a fully volumetric 3D printer on a chip.
The printer employs no moving parts, using a series of nanometer-scale antennas to direct beams of light into a small well of resin. "Prints" are completed in seconds, with the chip capable of fabricating two-dimensional patterns, such as letters. The chip itself is a bespoke silicon photonic chip, designed by the team.
"This system is completely rethinking what a 3D printer is," says Professor Jelena Notaros, the senior author on the team's research paper. "It is no longer a big box sitting on a bench in a lab creating objects, but something that is handheld and portable. It is exciting to think about the new applications that could come out of this and how the field of 3D printing could change."
The Notaros group is an interdisciplinary team of researchers in silicon photonics and photochemistry, combining prior research outcomes from MIT and external scientific trials. The group's earlier efforts in photonic chipmaking resulted in a photonic chip that can be placed on a U.S. quarter, utilizing the identical antennas used in this project. A series of 160-nanometer-thick optical antennas was fabricated on a chip using traditional fabrication methods, and light is directed from the antennas by varying the speeds of optical signals entering the antenna array.
Silicon photonics is a novel field of study in chipmaking that involves computer chips that transmit data using light, rather than electrons. The new discipline has attracted the attention of major firms and chipmakers on both sides of the Pacific, with China and the U.S. racing to unlock the potential of the tech. Nvidia already has its commercially available photonic-based network switch platform enabling 400 Tb/s interconnect, with AMD racing to acquire private photonics firms to catch up.
This unique photonic chip design was combined with new photocurable resins invented at UT Austin, resins that harden when exposed to specific wavelengths of light. When combined, the two technologies can create rudimentary 3D printed shapes and designs. A laser from outside the chip is fired through the antenna array up into a clear glass slide holding the photosensitive resin. The antennas then direct the laser light up into the resin in a programmable design, producing two-dimensional objects.
The project team's next step is to design a new, bespoke chip that will enable volumetric 3D printing beyond the 2D shapes it is currently outputting. This goal, "a chip that emits a hologram of visible light in a resin well to enable volumetric 3D printing in only one step," has already been outlined in the team's research paper published in Nature. "We are excited to continue working towards this ultimate demonstration," shared Notaros.
Whether this one-step volumetric light-based printer comes to fruition has yet to be seen. The field of silicon photonics is still relatively new compared to electronic chips, and further study in the field is ongoing. This novel approach to light-based 3D printing may become a significant development in the space, aided by the risk of danger to the current hobbyist market posed by the ongoing lawsuit between Bambu Labs and Stratasys, which threatens to undermine the market's ability to sell critical features, including heated build plates.
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