SOLUTIONS

  • Smaller

    With complete 3D Design Freedom in your PCBs, circuitry can be miniaturized, limited only by the area of the components on the surface of the board.

    In the future, Convexity hopes to bring integrated components to mainstream production. Imagine if your basic components, your diodes, transistors, resistors, capacitors, were all placed within the board itself… wow! Amazing!

  • Faster

    Using adaptive layering and variation of nozzle widths, Direct Ink Write 3D Printing is capable of incredible print speeds compared to other manufacturing methods.

  • Cheaper

    Direct Ink Write 3D Printers are not only ultra-low cost to manufacture, but they can also print with ultra-low cost materials. There is also no new skill required to work with Convexity’s system. Our cutting edge software works with the major industry ECAD and gerber file formats. It’s plug and play.

  • Versatile

    Convexity’s printers are built with highly scalable industry use in mind, so we use a simple highly versatile Direct Ink Write cartridge system, allowing us to print PCBs with any dispensable fluid or semisolid.

    So far, we have tested with four kinds of UV Curable dielectric inks, carbon & tin conductive inks, solder paste, chocolate, peanut butter, and pancake batter.

Seems like the perfect solution, right?

Not Quite

There are a few major issues with Additively Manufactured Electronics that Convexity aims to solve:

Major Barriers for AME

Trace Conductivity

Most currently available printed electronics systems do exactly what Convexity does. They lay down a layer of dielectric ink, followed by a circuit pattern of conductive ink. This works well enough, but even the most expensive conductive inks can’t beat the pure conductivity of bulk copper. Since electrical noise is a major design constraint for a lot of PCB Designers, traditional manufacturing is the way to go. Although some companies have managed to make use of some post-processing techniques like sintering to increase board conductivity, they just can’t beat traditional manufacturing.

Convexity Electronics is working on a new solution. With our commitment to designing a product to meet industry standards, we want to make the customer’s experience as seamless as possible. With that in mind, we have been working on a low-cost solution that maintains material versatility in our PCBs, while also increasing the conductivity of our PCB tracks to the same or near the same levels of bulk copper.

What is this cutting-edge method? Did they finally figure out cold metal printing? Are they sintering? Have they rediscovered the lost art of Alchemy? Unfortunately, we can’t talk at length about it just yet, but we are very excited to share it once it’s ready!

Software

A lesser issue, but Convexity is REALLY excited about the possibility of PCBs routed in 3D, with complete design freedom in all directions. Imagine how sad we were to discover that there wasn’t an ECAD software out there that could route PCBs in all directions. After an intense night of coding, our Founder developed a plugin for Autodesk Fusion360 that takes Gerber files and Altium netlist files as input, and uses splines to render a 3D model where all nets are connected with desired distances in mind. Is it pretty? No. Does it work quickly? Nope. Can it miniaturize almost any circuit and render awesome 3D Circuits? Yes it can.

Materials

As said before, most PCB 3D Printers make use of Dielectric and Conductive inks to make their boards. These are pretty common materials to print with, but what happens when you need your boards to be extra strong? What happens when you need your PCB to be extra insulative? Maybe it needs to flex, or withstand fire, or even change color. Heck! Maybe your PCB needs to be made of chocolate (have tried it; would not recommend)!

This is a double-sided problem. On one side, current methods of printing electronics use highly restrictive manufacturing methods, so the materials that ARE out there are only designed for screen printing, inkjet, aerosol jet, and the like. Luckily, Convexity’s Direct Write system supports almost any dispensable fluid, so if they can do it, we can do it.

On the other side, materials development just isn’t advanced enough in this field to support largescale production of a wide range of materials. Now, we won’t lie to you, Convexity doesn’t have the resources to develop a whole new range of materials for 3D Printed Electronics. We’d be sitting all day in the chemistry lab while our cool new printer collects dust, that’s no fun!

However, what we HAVE done is built our system in such a way that we have completely lowered the barrier to entry for materials development! Our industry-standard cartridge system means we can print almost any fluid or semisolid, with very few restrictions. If you need an edible chocolate PCB, fill that cartridge up with chocolate!

Infrastructure

Did you know that the PCB Fabrication Industry hasn’t seen any major changes in over 30 years? Crazy!

It’s no secret that the Giant of a technology that is photolithography dominates the PCB manufacturing industry. It’s such a well-established technology with its own standards, tolerances, and design parameters. It’s been optimized every way there is, but it hasn’t seen major change.

How can Additively Manufactured Electronics (AME) compete with such a Giant? Convexity aims to target the faults in traditional PCB manufacturing, offering companies the quality-of-life improvements that 3D Printed Electronics gives, while maintaining all the advantages and ease of use that traditional methods have.

In the past, deciding between AME and Traditional PCB Fabrication was a simple decision: “cool technology with lots of tradeoffs” or “ol’ reliable”. Convexity aims to give users an enhanced experience, not a completely different one.