Nomenil Aims to Make Additive Manufacturing Production-Ready

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Can additive manufacturing finally move beyond niche applications and into mainstream PCB production? Nomenil founders Bas Le Grand and Dr. Luca Gautero believe the answer lies not in the hardware, but in the software. Drawing on years of inkjet experience, they're developing tools designed to make additive manufacturing more predictable, scalable, and accessible for manufacturers.

Marcy LaRont: You’re fairly new to the industry, although you’ve both worked in inkjet for some time. How did Nomenil get started?

Bas Le Grand: My background is in physics, and I worked in the inkjet industry for about six years before co-founding Nomenil with Luca. We are located in Helmond in the Eindhoven region of the Netherlands, which is known as a high-tech region where Philips and ASML also reside.

Luca Gautero: We saw an opportunity to fill the gaps with new know-how. We decided to make a clean break with our jobs at the time because we wanted to take the right amount of time to focus on determining whether the market needs we observed were real. We left our jobs and started the company, which has allowed us to focus fully on both the technical and market aspects of the business.

LaRont: What is your prime objective and purpose for Nomenil?

Le Grand: We aim to bring additive manufacturing to the PCB industry. The manufacturing challenge is achieving manufacturing accuracy and repeatability. There are other examples of this technology in the market, and people claim that as long as the qualification is internal, like a captive PCB shop, it's feasible. We want to challenge that by delivering what we think is missing: an interface to knowledge and actionable skills for users.

LaRont: Additive is a newer area, but there's a lot of interest in it. As you mentioned, there are other products out there. What makes your inkjet technology different?

Le Grand: Mainly, that it’s simple. We’re developing models and data processing to enable inkjet printing flexibility with an understandable and simple interface. Achieving that as a technical goal requires data analysis—getting this model to predict fluid behavior, including all the complexities. We’ll use the subsequent data processing and usability to make reliable and repeatable production a simple reality.

LaRont: It sounds like your technology is built around the model you've created.

Gautero: Yes, inkjet printing itself is very flexible. It is the model that needs to be given specific direction to leverage the flexibility towards a desired outcome.

I will give you an example. Let’s say there is a certain board with a certain copper thickness tolerance. Nobody really cares how the inkjet machine will do it, what printing strategy it uses, or what resolution it chooses. All that is cared about is what needs to be achieved.

The questions are: Is it feasible? Are additional design rule check runs needed? How high is the expected yield on this board? These are the concerns of the user, so that is the information that needs to be provided. If you have tighter tolerances, but you don't need high throughput, that’s what the model needs to know. This is the kind of interaction we want to bring to the user. The user needn't be an expert in inkjet; the printing machine should be. Again, inkjet printing itself is a very flexible process.

LaRont: I like that you say it's very flexible. I do not know if that is a descriptor that comes to mind when looking at additive.

Gautero: The current belief is that it works only in a fixed situation, and that it doesn't necessarily work in other situations. As Bas presented yesterday, if you are working with a machine and you need a specific ink, engineer, or substrate to make it work, those are constraints on your process. If a machine can help you with software and reasoning, then the doors are open.

LaRont: Has anything been surprising to you in this journey so far?

Le Grand: Because we both were previously working in the inkjet ecosystem, we inherited the network. So, things have not been too surprising, but it's always good to go back to basics and make sure we are creating a good value proposition.

LaRont: Absolutely. What’s next for you?

Le Grand: It's a mixture of things. We are at the very beginning of our startup- journey. We are doing interviews with the experts on solder mask coating. Our question is “Is ‘X’ actually a common problem? Then we are analyzing what we offer, sculpting our solution to create value.

We have the history of where the market has been. We see that, in the past, the approach has typically been, “We have this tool, we need to push it to market.” Now we have much more freedom to go back to the market and potentially learn how will things may change in a year. We have the freedom to realize exactly what the market needs.

LaRont: That seems like an exciting place to be.

Gautero: We are currently a bit divided in our work. On one hand, we are focusing on this market research and developing our product. On the other hand, we provide a consultancy service as a bootstrap strategy for our company. We now have a consultancy job for photovoltaic inkjet machine, as an example. Inkjet extends beyond the use cases of the PCB industry.

LaRont: So, you're making those relationships and contacts, which is important. What problems and solutions are you working with?

Le Grand: These people already have a running inkjet machine in a production line, and they need software upgrades and hardware integrated into the existing solution to ramp up production. That's where we come in. We adjust the software and integrate hardware parts for them.

LaRont: That is a great value add to Nomenil’s core business. I wish you both tremendous success with your new company.