3D printing has gone through a lot of growing pains over the years and has finally made it mainstream. Just a few years ago, there was a big push in the kid's toy market for kid-friendly 3D printers that would help them learn some STEM skills and just get to play around making things. Now, I'm seeing 3D-printed crafts pop up at craft fairs all over my state. The crafts, which are 3D-printed animals and the like are mostly aimed at kids, but it's still interesting how far this tech has come. As it continues to grow, we'll likely start seeing improvements and enhancements around the design-build of 3D printers. Making them more portable and accessible.
Alexis Gajewski, senior editor at Plant Services recently reported on a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Texas at Austin that have teamed up to do just that by combining the fields of silicon photonics and photochemistry to create the first chip-based, non-mechanical 3D printer.
Below is an excerpt from her blog post:
The team outlines their latest innovation in a paper titled “Silicon-photonics-enabled chip-based 3D printer” which was published in Light: Science & Applications. In an excerpt from the piece, the team writes: “The field of silicon photonics has the potential to enable a paradigm-shifting solution to address this need for a next-generation 3D-printing technology. By leveraging scalable CMOS fabrication techniques to enable chip-based optical microsystems with new functionalities, improved system performance, decreased cost, and reduced size, weight, and power, silicon photonics has enabled next-generation optical technologies that have facilitated revolutionary advances for numerous fields spanning science and engineering, including computing, communications, sensing, and quantum engineering. An emerging class of integrated photonic systems is integrated optical phased arrays, which consist of an array of on-chip optical antennas fed with controlled phases and amplitudes using an integrated photonic circuit, enabling emission and dynamic control of free-space radiated light in a compact form factor, at low costs, and in a non-mechanical way.”
