Drawing upon 20 years of experience designing ink jet print heads, engineers at Dimatix developed this economical table-top-sized unit targeted at "one-off" circuit designs when engineers want to prove out a concept or quickly build a prototype. Martin Schoeppler, vice president of business development, explains that engineers were not able to use conventional thermal ink jet technology in the DMP-2800 because the heat would destroy metals and other organic materials. So they designed a piezoelectric, all-silicon printhead and acoustic membrane to create the droplets instead. To add versatility, a "fill-your-own-cartridge" system lets engineers work with their own dispensing materials at a lower cost than conventional prototyping. Capable of a very precise placement of material to create line widths in the micrometer range, Schoeppler says the printer could provide a quick means for a design engineer to build and test complex circuits that require numerous masking steps or to test out new material combinations. "In a matter of hours, a design engineer could print out several different versions of a multi-layered complex circuit, eliminating the need to go outside and pay a lot of money to have prototypes built and share intellectual property with a third party," says Schoeppler. At a cost of less than $30,000, compared to $100,000 and up for the specialty print heads employed for high-volume-production machines, the DMP 2800 seems almost like a steal. For more information, go to http://rbi.ims.ca/4917-638.
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Drawing upon 20 years of experience designing ink jet print heads, engineers at Dimatix developed this economical table-top-sized unit targeted at "one-off" circuit designs when engineers want to prove out a concept or quickly build a prototype. Martin Schoeppler, vice president of business development, explains that engineers were not able to use conventional thermal ink jet technology in the DMP-2800 because the heat would destroy metals and other organic materials. So they designed a piezoelectric, all-silicon printhead and acoustic membrane to create the droplets instead. To add versatility, a "fill-your-own-cartridge" system lets engineers work with their own dispensing materials at a lower cost than conventional prototyping. Capable of a very precise placement of material to create line widths in the micrometer range, Schoeppler says the printer could provide a quick means for a design engineer to build and test complex circuits that require numerous masking steps or to test out new material combinations. "In a matter of hours, a design engineer could print out several different versions of a multi-layered complex circuit, eliminating the need to go outside and pay a lot of money to have prototypes built and share intellectual property with a third party," says Schoeppler. At a cost of less than $30,000, compared to $100,000 and up for the specialty print heads employed for high-volume-production machines, the DMP 2800 seems almost like a steal. For more information, go to 
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