Design and Hybrid Additive Manufacturing of 3-D/Volumetric Electrical Circuits

For the first time, a fully 3-D electric circuit was modeled in a 3-D environment and manufactured via an automated hybrid direct-write 3-D printing process. The implications and applications of this significant achievement are enormous because it allows circuits to be designed and manufactured in virtually any form factor. To accomplish this, a custom computer-aided design (CAD) tool was programmed into an open-source modeling software to layout components and route interconnects. The custom CAD tool imports the netlist and component geometries from a schematic capture program. Components can be placed at any position and be oriented at any angle. Interconnects can meander smoothly throughout the circuit following 3-D splines. The interconnects can be placed manually or automatically between components. After laying out the components and routing interconnects, the tool exports Standard Tessellation Language files of the dielectric and metal portions of the final circuit to be 3-D printed. To manufacture the circuit, fused-deposition modeling of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene plastic and microdispensing (μD) of DuPont CB028 silver paste was used. To demonstrate, a functional 555 timer circuit was designed and built to flash an LED.