What a Difference a Year Makes: Voxel8 and the 3D Printing Pioneering Spirit

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Barry Matties:

Bell: The circuit board you see here is actually a prototype of the watch circuit. We use it ourselves to figure out if the circuit was working before we changed the geometry and stuck it in a novel form factor.

Matties: Is it a simple single-sided board?

Bell: Yes, it a single-sided board. If you were to route a board to just understand how the circuit is working and to de-bug it, you would do something like that on a circuit board meld. That's our equivalent and it takes about five minutes to print.

Matties: What market are you pursuing with the circuit board? Is this rapid prototyping?

Bell: We really want people to start working on 3D electronics applications. The fact that we can do circuit boards is a great checkbox for us, but it's not something we're necessarily pushing. This is really a stepping stone to the 3D integrated circuits, wrapping antennas around cellphone cases or doing hearing aids, etc.

Matties: Have you considered the rapid prototyping market?

Bell: It’s definitely a market that we like. If we look at the long term, we want to see millions of phones manufactured. The rapid prototyping of this kind of stuff isn't going to do that. If you look at the competitors out there, for instance, they start at about $10,000. Our $9,000 platform can do most of the capabilities of that quicker, cheaper, etc., so there are definitely applications there.

Our business model is applying materials for novel 3D printing applications. We started with looking at the printed electronics areas. We have silicone materials and other materials that can go into apparel, like footwear. We can do smart watches. We can solve challenges that designers and engineers have where they couldn't find a fabrication method that would work. We're really looking at targeted materials development for applications like antennas, for shoes, etc.

On display here we have inductive charging little samples where we can actually print those loops, and turn on lights through what you'd find is a typical inductive cellphone charger. Trying to wrap those coils around something in a novel geometry or in areas where you typically couldn't have, that is interesting to us as well.

Matties: We're not going to buy products; we're just going to buy schematics and print our products.

Bell: That's a future that we should look forward to. The real question to me personally is this: Are we going to be able to print all of the ICs and LEDs and all that? I think we're really going to connect them together, but I don't think we can replace transistors at the current scales that they're being printed through this type of technology. It's really going to be connecting all of these discrete components together and making it happen, and doing that in the most efficient way possible.

Feinberg: I agree that's probably where it is right now, but to me that also sounds a little bit like 1958, when we could make circuit boards, but had to connect the two sides with eyelets. I think we're going to be amazed at what you guys are going to be doing.

Bell: I look at it purely from a printing/operations perspective, where if you want to print a transistor on the nano scale, you're going to need a nano-sized nozzle to print with. If you want a billion of those, the time taken to do all those movements at that scale is significant. There probably will be another technology that comes around, maybe like inkjet or similar, that can actually print those transistors more efficiently than the direct-write application that we have. I think our application is really best for connecting components together.

Feinberg: It's certainly a big piece of it.

Bell: It definitely is.

Matties: Congratulations, Michael. You're here again and your business looks like it’s growing. Thank you so much.

Bell: Thank you. It’s good to talk with you both.

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