Conversations about innovation typically begin and end with megatrends: the invention of the microprocessor, the discovery of carbon nanotubes, Google’s algorithms for Internet search. But some of the most important advances are born deep inside the manufacturing supply chain and are never seen by consumers, even though they transform products we use every day.
Arthur L. Chait, president and chief executive of EoPlex Technologies in Redwood City, Calif., is the architect of one such transformation. His company has developed radically new technology for fabricating pill-size electronic components for wireless communications, clean-energy applications, semiconductor packaging, and more. Although very small, each component is a complex sandwich of ceramic, metal, or polymer layers that perform different functions. And EoPlex can crank out these parts — everything from tiny antennas for cell phones to key elements in pressure sensors for car tires — more quickly, in higher volume, and in many cases, at lower cost than standard manufacturing methods.
To see how this process works, it helps to understand how components such as cell-phone antennas are normally produced. Each phone may contain a half-dozen different antennas, which allow it to communicate simultaneously with a cell tower, a Bluetooth headset, a Wi-Fi network, and also receive GPS satellite signals. Today, the metal and ceramic elements that form the antenna are stamped from sheets of materials and assembled by robots.
Bake and Sinter the Substrate
EoPlex’s technique more closely resembles printing semiconductors on silicon. And, just as in the semiconductor business, the shift in technology opens the door to improved designs at lower cost. As Chait describes it, the process lays down whole sheets of different materials in patterns, building anywhere from 20 to 500 layers. Then the resulting substrate is baked and sintered at high temperatures into finished components. Each part, Chait says, contains “all the necessary internal…