Nicholas Fang’s startup Boston Micro Fabrication has unveiled a new method for creating ultra-precise 3D printers.
It is a great technological advance since the hardware of many products -cameras, latest generation mobiles, chips, laptops…- is getting smaller and smaller. A trend that has led many companies to find new ways to create small parts with greater precision.
One of them is Boston Micro Fabrication, the company founded in 2016 by MIT professor Nicholas Fang to improve the resolution and accuracy of 3D printing. Today, Boston Micro Fabrication is helping customers in the race to ever smaller parts by offering a new type of printer that is being used to create electronic and medical devices or chips, among other products.
The company’s machines use technology co-developed by Fang to print millimeter-sized products with micron-scale details — objects that are visible to the naked eye but whose details will make you squint to appreciate them.
More freedom for part design
Boston Micro Fabrication claims that the printers enable the creation of new parts with complex geometries, tiny size, or new features. “You can print things that you can’t create a mold for,” says John Kawola, the company’s CEO. “That’s one of the reasons a lot of people talk about add-on manufacturing, because they’re no longer constrained by the limits of the molds. That gives companies new freedom to design.”
Fang has studied the properties of light and microfabrication for more than twenty years, ten of which have been as a fellow at MIT. An important part of his work, which takes place in his Nanophotonics and Nanofabrication laboratory, has to do with the study of 3D printer processes that expose a material to light to harden it. One such process, digital light processing (DLP) uses flashes of light from a projector to harden each layer of the material being printed.
Boston Micro Fabrication uses special lenses to project light at much smaller scales. “The process used shares a lot of similarities with microscopes, except that we create a digital image instead of illuminating uniformly on a microscope,” explains Fang.
