Photonic chips may revolutionize a lot of processes and electronic devices, including 3D printing.Photonic chips, the development of the photonic integrated circuit, silicon photonics, light valves, integrated quantum photonics, the trusty CMOS chips in your phone—these are all fellow travelers working together to make a new world possible.Driven by the demand for billions of electron devices, the sensors needed for a more connected world, the ceaseless march of lithography, the success of companies such as Apple and Nvidia, the GPU as an idea, and the TSMC foundry model whereby you can get access to the chips you need as you want them, are key enablers to this.
If all this economic might wasn’t enough, better fiber optic communications, quantum computing, displays, and more can all benefit from photonics.Photonics is a now quickly expanding field of managing, transmitting, and receiving light.The photon travels at light speed, and the more we can harness it, the quicker and higher bandwidth all communications can be.
At the same time, photonics could be more reliable, cheaper to produce, and use less power.One prime example of this is the photonic integrated circuit (PIC), and other systems-on-a-chip kinds of applications where a lot of the functions can be integrated on one circuit.These are used in cloud computing, sensors, and LIDAR.
Now, application-specific PICs (ASPICs, PASICs) are growing as well, while programmable photonics let chips be much more versatile.The photonics market as a whole may be worth $900 billion, while the PIC market may be worth $15 billion, and the silicone photonics market may be over $2 billion.A criminally overlooked 2024 Nature paper by UT Austin and MIT researchers Sabrina Corsetti, Milica Notaros, Tal Sneh, Alex Stafford, Zachariah A.
Page, and Jelena Notaros looked at how silicon photonics may be used for a chip-based 3D printer.The advantages are obvious, with a single chip taking over much of the mechanical functionality of the printer while replacing the light source as well.With no moving parts, the printer is simpler, and potentially far less expensive to make and operate.
This not only has a huge potential impact on light source vendors, but also on light engine vendors and OEMs.Photonics could be the most significant disruption to 3D printing, ever.It could also make some 3D printers radically cheaper and very different.
Companies such as Agate Sensors promise to reduce spectroscopy to a chip-based process.Not surprisingly, a lot of VC funding now is backing photonics for AI, data centers, and communications.PHOTON IP hopes to make silicon photonic chips for cloud applications more cheaply, LightMatter got $400 million to let photonic interconnects work faster and cheaper for AI, Scintil received $58 million for a similar play, Xscape also hopes to save datacenter energy, and OpenLight raised $34 million to help people design PASICs.
Apart from the AI bonfire that investors are pitching themselves into, interconnects generally, and enablers for a further photonics future more specifically, are interested areas seeing money.It is only a matter of time before someone makes an applicable chip that can power a lot of 3D printers.Perhaps they go through the trouble of designing and making one at a foundry, or maybe they can use something made for another purpose.
In the paper, the team used a silicon-photonics CMOS chip in a small chamber, coupled with a liquid-crystal waveguide to work with the resin.The chip both emits the light and steers it.The system is a “liquid-crystal-based cascaded integrated optical phased array” or “visible-light integrated optical phased array system” that acts as a vat polymerization system on a chip.
They hope that in the future, this system will be able to volumetrically build parts fast.They also believe that the entire light system will be able to fit in the palm of your hand.The resin is an adapted aza-boron-dipyrromethene organic photoredox catalyst.
The initial printed part measured 60 μm in height and was 2D.For their next steps, they hope to marry it to a recoater to make it 3D.Ultimately, the researchers hope to make volumetric systems without moving parts.
Replacing the whole printer is just one way that chips can alter additive.Inleap Photonics is doing away with the galvo though solid state beam steering.Its pixel-based process can increase production methods by a factor of six and enables speeds of up to 200000 m/s.
In 2024, we also wrote about Photonic-Crystal Surface-Emitting Lasers (PCSELs), another family of photonics chips that could very well on their own impact additive.Chips, therefore, could completely alter the way we 3D print.It is early days for array-based systems and photonic chip-based manufacturing tools.
But, given their volume, precision, and cost, they could one day make serious inroads into additive and change how we build parts.Subscribe to Our Email Newsletter Stay up-to-date on all the latest news from the 3D printing industry and receive information and offers from third party vendors.Print Services Upload your 3D Models and get them printed quickly and efficiently.
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