Printable Materials with Embedded Electronics and Radio Frequency Components

Direct Digital Manufacturing is a combination of 3D printing, Direct printing, pick and place and milling to manufacture electronic devices.Next generation Direct Digital Manufacturing will have a significant amount of 3D printing and this aids in reducing costs due to waste and also due to products on demand.The ability to print parts that match state of the art in performance is challenging in the RF regime.This team has demonstrated quality working 3D printed RF devices and including the worlds first 3D printed Phased Array Antenna.We will advance the printing to include studies for rugged devices that are tested and proven and then also embedded which provides monolithic devices that can be temperature controlled using specialized printed patterns.Phase I will be hardware demonstrations that prove the viability of the approach.The printed device will include antennas, RF electronics, buried RF electronics and the characterization results of each.This will lead to more advanced software for integrating both modeling and prints in a single package thus enabling better predictions on how the device will perform before it is printed.