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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

certainly an area we're keeping an eye on.

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

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!

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.

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)

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!

Awesome feedback, this is definitely on our list of things to add, you can be sure to see it soon!

email sent!

We are targeting MLS integration with our next development phase, however, which would autofill all of this information.

Right now you can generate a report on the property using as little as Address, Purchase price, Square footage and a guess of beds/baths. We estimate the rest based on market data - the basis for each estimate is shown in the report.