Did you Say Capacitors? Think about Additively Manufacturing Them

          DragonFly-3D printed PCB with 6 capacitors and soldered components

 

In our latest wave of innovation, Nano Dimension’s technologists have additively manufactured printed circuit boards (PCBs) with 100% 3D printed embedded capacitors. While this technology proof of concept is in its early stages, our team is now working to develop a comprehensive precision additive manufacturing process for capacitors. This innovative technology will enable our customers to effectively use the space in a PCB and even reduce its total size.

Valuable Real Estate

Today’s traditional PCB manufacturing technologies require capacitors to be mounted as any other component mounted onto a PCB. Manufacturers create capacitors at tremendous volumes and at very low cost. However, they burden the full PCB assembly process with challenges such as having a secure, reliable and timely supply; and furthermore, take valuable circuit board real-estate. Because additive manufacturing allows for printing of capacitors buried in the body of the PCB – the result is effective use of the PCB area for other devices and reduction of the total area.

                 3D printed Capacitors End to End with DragonFly Pro System

This could be a breakthrough in creating smaller circuit board footprints with significant advantages such as equivalent or even higher functional density. Other benefits might include shorter circuit paths, expanded bandwidths, increased signal speed, improved fine tuning of the clock in microcontrollers, VCOs (Voltage Controlled Oscillators) or Synthesizers, minimized noise and reduced assembly costs. In other words, once this advanced additive manufacturing technology for printed capacitors is released, customers can realize smaller, cheaper and better circuits while gaining new ways of optimizing PCB designs.

Likely growth areas for  additively manufactured capacitors include medical sensors, high-pass filters, high-sensitivity sensors, communication boards with a filter on the antenna output, applications requiring frequency fine-tuning, remote controls, cameras, doorbells and more.

Follow the link for more details on this and other attributes of our DragonFLY AME 3D Printer.