 Hello my name is Peter Harrop, I'm chairman of ID TechX and you watchers and listeners probably know me anyway but we're at the big event, the ID TechX show and we're interviewing people and I'm coming here, although this is 3D printing company, a very unusual one, with some other interests that are also very important. We're seeing that this show enormous interest now in what is moving from components in a box, 1900 technology to structurally electronics. So even your smartwatch is components in a box, time to move on, that is so yesterday and the ability to make electronic and electric and optical and magnetic and other things all combined in smart materials moves from very small things where there's not a lot going on at the moment to something a bit bigger than a mobile phone, the interior trim of a car and overhead controls and all that, where we have many people here who are involved in like Taktatec, from Finland and the company from Taiwan in doing in-mold electronics and that has its place but it doesn't have the resolution to do what we're going to talk about here. So let's go down in size a little bit and we're going to interview Andrea Boobendorfer who is from the company Callahan Innovation and I want you to please tell us about it. Hi Peter, I'm working on the MicroMaker 3D project at Callahan Innovation as you were saying before with 3D printing it's totally changed the way that we make things but we were interested on the micro fabrication level. There's no way of rapid prototyping very tiny sort of structures that we're interested in so these are some test examples of that we've been making and typically these involve some really expensive long time-consuming processes that need to be suited up in a clean room which takes millions of dollars worth of infrastructure and equipment to make these things. There's no rapid prototyping with micro fabrication so we've developed an entirely new type of 3D printing to manufacture these types of devices right down to five microns box or resolution and that's an X, Y and Z. So this type of printing we've called laminated resin printing and it is based on some micro fabrication principles allowing us to get that type of resolution and if I can show you on a demonstration box this is a one-third scale model that we had printed of the prototype that we have developed. We take a photoresist quality drive film like this it is a five micron high quality film able to withstand continuous operating temperatures from minus 60 to plus 200 degrees Celsius resistant to all known acid, silvents and bases and this is supplied on high volume rolls. So we put this on a roll through the machine rolled across with one support material removed transported the ribbon symbolizing that the film material that we use. Each layer of the 3D print is shown with the projector that's here a special UV projector that activates a particular area in that film. Once that area has been activated which takes about three seconds there's some laminated rollers that move across and laminate that stack down onto the print bed here and we repeatedly expose and laminate expose and laminate expose and laminate until we've built up the basis of the 3D structure then we take the block out of the 3D printer all of the areas to be polymerized have been exposed and liberated a catalyst from the projector and we then put it on a hot plate and the heat cure from that then fully polymerizes the structure together in the support material so essentially it's a laminated type of printing but with no adhesives so we have a fully polymerized single unit structure with the five micron resolution and the support material is highly soluble and is simply washed away but this support material also allows us to print overhangs and membranes and other type of structures that can move and flex so it's also ideally placed for printing micro sensor type of devices such as that you'd have and you're my phone for being able to tell what its orientation is for example. So what are we talking about conductors or insulators? The material itself is naturally highly insulating but you can see we also have had a little bit of interest in depositing metal layers onto it so we can preload metal coated films onto the film as we put it which means we have a choice where and when to put metal through the devices that we're printing we're also very interested in looking at nanofunctionalization of the films that we use so essentially if we can prototype depositing conductive, semiconductor and insulating materials then essentially we can rapid prototype an enormous range of tiny very high value structures. We bring in the metal in advance of the process so this film that we'd put in would have a pre-coated layer of metal on it or another alternative is to have a metal loaded film with nanoparticles inside that. So there's several options about how we can metalize and how we can functionalize these components that we produce. So the patterning of the metal depends on which layer that we're going to put it in and how the metal is loaded. In this case I only had metal on a single layer so the metal was being able to put down in advance and because the metal is nanoparticles and the pattern is on the microstructure I've patterned from the reverse side so that the pattern that is going to stick to the metal particles stays while everything else is washed away but because the metal nanoparticles are so much smaller than the micro level patterning we just get left with no loss of resolution around the edges for it. So simple test case. So the actual patterning is done by etching. So in this case you have etched off the metal or washed it off. But this is just one way of at least three that we've started trying to do this. We were also very interested in the idea that with the metal loading, as soon as the microstructures afterwards remove the organic material as a binder which means we can make some extremely small metal parts. But at the moment it's insulator that you're depositing and you can pattern it. That's right. At the moment we're building up material in epoxy which is a highly insulating material. That's right, we're in New Zealand. There's actually really, there's two of us, there's technical people in the team and our senior business development manager, Kath has just come back. And the universe is helping? We're actually at a government agency, Callaghan Innovation is New Zealand's innovation agency. Which city? We're based near Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. And we've just unveiled this technology for the very first time at this meeting. So yesterday was our first public display. Well we get a lot of first announcements. It's a particularly exciting one. I think that we see that in the world of structural electronics, building up structures now with sometimes in this case very small amounts of material and multi-layer and all sorts of capabilities. It is actually possible with just with metal patterning to do amazing things because you know the things that are just sub-wavelengths, they're not nano-dimension, they may use nano-materials, but things that are less than a wavelength for whatever you're dealing with, light, microwaves or whatever, there are for instance two routes with metamaterials and there's also the route of going to Nantennas where you rectify light. It's all in the labs, it's all university of course, USA mainly, but it's fascinating that just by metal patterning you could potentially make photovoltaics that's much more efficient than PN junctions ever could be and that you could do bending of light, making things invisible, that's the party trick of course with metamaterials, but very advanced terahertz components and so on. So from our point of view, from what our analysts say about this sort of product, it has enormous range of possible applications. It can be used far way beyond the obvious miniaturisation of conductors and interconnects and antennas and electrodes, there's much more to it and I think that's very exciting. But what's the twinkling your eye? When you're working on this, you're thinking well you know I'm going to be asked where will my company burn its money mainly, what is the application? So I'm going to ask that, what's the answer? That's a great question, I'm very excited about this technology in particular because it's a low cost and affordable way of bringing rapid prototyping to micro fabrication. Essentially what we want to do is disrupt the micro fabrication industry in the same way that 3D printing is disrupted manufacturing, to allow us to rapid prototype the really miniaturised scale. I say there's endless opportunities with micro structures, miniaturised structures because there's so many drivers of having smaller devices that use less power, take less resources to mine, just even being able to fit something like your phone in your pocket that has so many sensors in that direct, that detect what direction they're in, all of this capability. The thing that would get me most of excited at all would be for people to be able to rapid prototype structures that I've never even heard of and that's the beauty of 3D printing. I think that's brilliant, that's right, like the Nobel Prize winner Feinstein said there's plenty of room at the bottom, absolutely. So that's fascinating, thank you very much. Are there any other applications in your mind, apart from prototyping, is there products that could be made and sold? We have a number of different machines that we're considering building, although we've developed this primarily as a 3D printer, we're also well aware that it's similar to be able to be used as electronic print masks, for example, that pattern that we put down on a layer could be something that could define an electrical pattern. So being able to combine a 3D printed structure with an electronically printed structure means that I think there's going to be some amazing opportunities with built in micro, micro structures and electronics, because you need that combination of active moving structures that are essential for sensors as well as the electronics together. Yes, I think that's very interesting because it resonates a little bit with people like Tactitech in Finland doing the largest scale things where you probably have a common challenge and that is there is no good simulation software or design software for 3D devices. It's crazy, but it's true. And so Tactitech said at a recent meeting in North Finland that they're going to move to be a software business to actually reflect that. So they will do the work out the design rules and the physics and the chemistry and what's possible in their world, which is complementary to yours, much bigger, and themselves try to be a software business like ARM, whether they can be sold for $28 billion in due course, I don't know, but you've got to be ambitious in all this. So I think you will find that you might have to develop software perhaps if you get into that area or your licensees will have to, won't they? There's certainly a lot of directions that we can take it in with that, but one of the aspects of that you mentioned of requiring the simulation is something that we've been particularly interested in ourselves because this material that we're using for rapid prototyping is actually the production material as well, which means you don't have to look at changes in material characteristics from your prototype to your production material. So what you design is what you can actually use. Particularly in the medical area, we want things as small as possible. We really do want them to vanish, don't we? And they've got to be biocompatible, but you can use a great variety of materials, presumably. A great variety of materials that as long as it is photopolymerizable and in a dry form, we can use it with this technology and we've got our patent has been written in quite a range of different ways to encompass a range of different structures. However, the material we're already using is recognised widely as being enormously biocompatible and it's already been used in a number of biomedical applications. Very much. We look forward to hearing from you every year. We'll keep up with what you're doing. And we're very privileged to have you here. And it's, if I'd like to say one thing, I have one frustration with this company. I've come to this stand time and time again, and she has people queuing up to talk to her, and I couldn't do my interview. So that's a lovely problem to have. Anyway, bless you. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Fantastic to be here. And as you say, we've been very busy, but I'm also very grateful to publicly have the opportunity to thank IDTX for this launch pad is the first unveiling of this technology. It's been a fantastic forum for us to do this and much appreciated.