Recent trends in additive manufacturing of electronics devices

Abstract

Over the last few decades, there has been an increasing interest in manufacturing complex three-dimensional (3D) structures for theoretical models. This has escalated the research in the field of electronic devices fabrication. Advancement in electronics technology has led to electronics fabrication and manufacturing of new materials within a smaller lattice space. Several conductive materials like copper, carbon fibre, silver, graphene, and ferrites are available in the form of filaments. These filaments ease the fabrication of electronic devices through existing additive manufacturing techniques with minimal modifications. Additive manufacturing techniques provide significant competitive advantages due to their ability to adapt to the part's geometrical complexity and customized design to be manufactured. This review mainly focuses on using or the need for additive manufacturing in electronic device fabrication. Further, this article outlines the advantages of using additive manufacturing in the different fields of electronics fabrication, such as power electronics, sensors, batteries, solar cells, stretchable electronics, and embedded and wearable electronics. This paper also focuses on the methodologies adopted in additive manufacturing to overcome the issues encountered by conventional manufacturing methods.