In general, the ECAM process is actually a highly energy efficient means of manufacturing especially when compared with other metal AM techniques that use either a laser or furnace to thermally process the material. Specifically, there's quite a lot of energy that goes into making the metal powders that is avoided as the input to the ECAM system is a precursor material several steps upstream of a typical refined metal.
Yes the microelectrode array is the key to driving parallelism of the process, making it area based (layer-at-once) rather than point deposition. DLP/LCD vs laser SLA or FDM is a good analogy!
This is one of the benefits of the ECAM process happening completely at room temperature. Since the metal is deposited directly out of a liquid metal feedstock there's no thermal processing (sintering, melting, etc) which have traditionally caused shrinkage/warpage and porosity issues in other metal AM technologies.
Since the ECAM process has control over the deposit at the atomic scale, an extremely high level of purity is achieved. This is very important for high performance applications requiring thermal or electrical conductivity for instance.
Yes! One of the major benefits from not using a powdered metal feedstock is that minimum feature size is no longer limited by powder size, and instead is determined by our electrode "pixel" size which is 33 microns today and will get even smaller over time.
The room temperature deposition process also means we can print directly onto substrates like PCBs, ceramics or Silicon wafers to enable some very unique functionality.
You're right - electroplating isn't traditionally very fast. Much of the system has been engineered to drive a build speed that's relevant for mass manufacturing while maintaining material properties (think 100-1000x faster than typical electroplating)
Very, very cool. If you can make metal 3D printing viable for consumers I'll be the first in line to buy one (though I realize that's probably quite a ways away).
CTO of Fabric8 here - happy to answer any questions you may have about the technology or company. As you can tell we've got a process that's quite different than other metal AM techniques with some very unique benefits that we're excited to share!
Tons of questions, this is incredibly cool! Can you discuss:
1.) How you compensate for anode consumption/geometry changes over the lifetime of the anode. For instance, does the center get worn away or do you try to uniformly use each "pixel".
2.) More details on anode "pixel" geometry and minimum feature size.
3.) Can you talk about the development process? Did you have in situ measurement, or post build analysis of the part and anode.
It’s really cool and I wish I had one of these machines. On the assumption that I couldn’t afford such a machine myself for DIY, it would be really cool to have a send-cut-send like service. It seems like the relatively gentle process and I assume predictable results with minimal post processing would lend itself to an high degree of automation. Perhaps a scale out manufacturing set up where the speed of an individual machine is less important than the throughput of having many machines.
There are a lot of little random things that I would design if I knew there was a capability to have it made at non-aerospace prices. Initially heatsinks, manifolds, heat exchangers, but possibly many random things depending on the pricing.
Sure, there is a huge gamut of prices from aerospace to just above material costs. On the expensive side I would use it judiciously, on the economical side I would use it for just about everything and so would many others. I do a bit of DIY and a large amount of the design work is to work around limitations of cheaper materials and cheaper processes. Most of what I make is onesie-twosie where the design costs dominate so I can afford to spend more on a more expensive materials and processes to cut back on the design. But it would be extra amazing if there was an economical high quality process that is suitable for prototyping and would also be amenable to cost competitive mass manufacturing. That would be absolutely world changing. If I could just list designs somewhere and customers have them printed on demand, either via Amazon or some drop-ship, I could recoup a lot of the design costs so I could spend more time designing things - maybe even make a career out of it. Instead of needing a whole factory to support the low cost manufacturing of a single part it could just be a design document sitting on a server somewhere.
I understand that it is not in Fabric8s interest to do this though, expensive machines are high margin and exclusivity is required to maintain a bit of a monopoly for their customers so that their customers can justify purchasing the expensive machines in the first place. If Fabric8 were to start out with expensive machines and then subsequently release cheaper machines they would burn their previous customers. That would make this one of the many cool things that I can't use until the patents expire which would be a damn shame and would also make the technology completely uninteresting to me as I would have to focus on alternatives in the interim. It took a long time to go from Rep-Rap to Bambu Labs for FDM but with increased interest in the space that process is speeding up. Hopefully Micronics will manage a consumer Nylon SLS printer. A ton of small scale manufacturing technology is being made cheaply enough for home use and services like PCBWay and Send-Cut-Send have really democratized high quality manufacturing. I can make many things production quality with near zero overheads and I can buy things from others who have done the same at similarly low costs.
Something like send-cut-send for ECAM seems inevitable and it would be up to Fabric8 to decide if they want to cannibalize themselves instead of having someone else undercut them. I don't know how defendable their patents are, there does seem to be a fair amount of prior art. There is probably a bunch of trade secrets though. For them one of the downsides of having such a promising solution is that there is an even greater incentive for competitors to enter the market. I would posit that long term there is more money to be made with a scale-out low margin mass market solution where they could better leverage trade secrets gleaned from process experience than than selling individual high margin machines. If they kept overheads low enough it would never be in anyone else's interest to enter the market and they could leverage their trade secrets for above average returns ad infinitum.
> If I could just list designs somewhere and customers have them printed on demand, either via Amazon or some drop-ship, I could recoup a lot of the design costs so I could spend more time designing things - maybe even make a career out of it.
Very detailed description.
Would it be a bad idea for your customers to take your design document and test it in virtual environment and once tests are passed - you would go to production right away?
Not sure on the question. I'm primarily a software guy so I'd prefer to not interact with customers at all so it could be a commission type set up. It's unlikely that I could make as much money from hardware as I do from software so while being a hardware designer sounds like fun it will likely just be in support of my software work. I do ML and water cool my GPUs to get an extra 30% perf out of them but getting water cooling blocks can be a pain with slow and unreliable supply. EKWB is currently having issues because they buy in bulk from wholesalers and push product on to vendors who then try to sell to customers so when the market dips there are cashflow problems. I would prefer to be able to buy a GPU, measure the geometry, whip up some CAD and send it off for production. It really simplifies things.
If I understand correctly: you want to create your own design of a water cooling for your GPU (let's say RTX4090) - test it to make sure it will work in the real world - and once test is successful send your CAD to factory and they can produce and assemble all components?
Are you doing it for the whole cooling unit from scratch or just 1 part? (like a fan or some holder)?
What is the most common reason you would order v2 from the manufacturer after you receive v1 and test it in the real world?
The way I see it is that I make the CAD, send the CAD to the part supplier (Fabric8) who automatically check to make sure it’s printable, they then make the parts and post it to me. I would do the assembly myself if needed but would probably try to design things to be minimal / no assembly. The hope would be that this process would be cost effective at scale so if I need more I could just press a button.
I run a on-prem mini cluster which is water cooled but the customers need edge compute which should stay air cooled. I would probably try to make a blower style vapor chamber for nvidia gpus so I can ram air through without dealing with nvidia driver fuckery. NVidia segments the market based on heat sinks, binning and drivers so the enterprises segment has to pay far more. The 4090 blowers made by OEMs are gimped, rare, and expensive and I think intentionally so.
Not only is consumer grade cheaper but it’s way less hassle to get - the Enterprise sales pipeline is a total pain as the costs keep changing and they keep trying to push older overpriced stuff onto me like I wouldn’t notice. And thats even if they think you’re big enough to talk to. Much easier to pull consumer stuff from the market on an as needed basis.
My software supports graceful degradation so I don’t need ‘enterprise’ reliability. I don’t need high speed interconnects either. I need TFLOPS on dense matmuls, run in parallel batches. Consumer GPUs are fine for this, replace the heatsinks with a blower optimized and put in some powerful fans and take off. I could pack more into a single computer and to have a lower amortized cost and a higher density.
If the vapor chamber blower heatsink is too expensive then I might as well just buy more GPU computers and let them run slower.
On a second read, I would like to rewrite your workflow as follows:
I would prefer to be able to:
[x] buy a GPU, -> [v] Download SimReady USD of your GPU from nVidia website.
[v] whip up some CAD
[v] import USD of nVidia card into CAD
[v] measure the geometry using CAD
[v] Design cooling element
-> Export CAD to USD
-> Import CAD as SimReady Asset into nVidia Omniverse with tests you need.
-> Once simulation is OK send final CAD to production (or better from GPU simulation into simulation of production on one of the factories or 3d printers)
In this scenario:
- SimReady USD of a GPU must already exist inside nVidia. They could make it available for simulation inside Omniverse. (or build open high level model yourself)
- Thermal simulation app is something that nVidia needs for their business now and in the future. They could share current software with public and let people like you download it, change it and run simulations with your changes (or build open high level model yourself)
I'm wondering how difficult it would be to simulate important effects on your models. Do you think the above process has potential to improve your process or did I miss some important detail of your work?
Oh, with regards to the actual design, I DIY my own computational engineering software, based on implicit modeling which works well for theses sorts of complex geometries. I don’t know about the simulation, I guess I theory i could export the model into a sim. I would base the broad strokes of the design known working reference implementations. I think there is a ton of potential in custom vapor chamber stuff so maybe I’ll play with that but I think it’ll easily become overkill. I think perhaps have the vapor chamber printed and thermal glue skived heatsinks on top. Unlike normal GPU designs I can tolerate much more noise for air pressure.
For me, good enough is good enough I’m not going to be super optimized as the cost tradeoffs for such optimizations don’t work out as favorable at my scale.
It appears that Fabric8 do intend on targeting all the way down to low margin mass manufacturing with a high number of low cost machines which they run in house on a manufacturing service basis. They’re targeting 1000+ batches but I assume in time they’ll be able to do the very small batch stuff as well. Perhaps with a strategic partner that’ll deal with the small annoying customers like me. I’m super exited by this technology and am happy that they’re targeting areas that I think will be most impactful for the world of manufacturing, as well as long term profitable for them, and hopefully eventually very accessible for DIYers like myself.
I think most regular people are in the dark on how much the world is set to change by such process improvements as these. Cheap complexity is like internet level world changing, maybe more so. You really can download a car.
1 - Yes, we are currently doing this
2 - Right now our focus is on flat substrates, curved surfaces are a little trickier
3 - Any pure metal or alloy system that can be electroplated would be compatible with our approach. Aluminum and Titanium are difficult but not impossible. We're focused on copper as our first commercial material but have other material systems in development.
4 - Our current pixel size is 33 microns, ~50micron negative features should be doable. Controlled wick structures are actually a really good application of the technology
5 - Our primary business model actually is to offer print services to our customers. Feel free to reach out to me via email in profile if there's an application you'd like to explore
Where does this fall on the hazardous/toxicity scale? What kind of off-gassing/risks are there, especially compared to existing high resolution powder based systems?
Disclaimer: I don’t know much about this field, this may be a dumb question.
Much safer than existing powder-based systems. The feedstock is effectively water based so none of the flammability risks of metal powder. No special gases required, no high powered lasers or thermal processing sytems.
That being said it still is an industrial process and requires responsible handling of the feedstock and equipment to ensure safety to personnel and the environment.
Metallic ionic solutions are usually strong acids. They are made by dissolving metal in sulfuric or nitric acids. Looks like they are using copper sulfate as the electrolyte. After the copper is deposited you are left with sulfuric acid.
That's a cool video. They even show creating multi-metal stuff with it, which seems like it'd be pretty lined up for creating meta-materials when using a small enough tip resolution. :)
First time hearing about the technique, sounds exciting.
I see a close comparison in features to SLM [1], which is already established as a core 3D Metal printing technique for a long time. SLM has precision down to the size of a mechanical pencil's lead. In what way is ECAM better? Is it more precision + no need to handle powder or shield gas + no need for laser source and containment, minus ECAM being slower. Am I missing some crucial feature?
Has there been any work on photoelectric plating? You could then use DPL to project a pattern for an entire layer at once. I'm not sure how one could ensure uniform thickness. Just wondering if the basics of such an approach have been developed or if its even possible.
I've considered the idea before and it seemed to me that since you need a fixed number of electrons for every metal ion you deposit that the currents end up being huge.
Also deposit speeds tend to be slow. How fast can your process layer metal (say in grams per hour)?
Yes, currents can be high as they directly correlate with build rate. But the voltages are typically low, making it a lower power process than one would think.
100-1000x faster than a typical electroplating process
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