Superior Printed Digital Options (APES), a U.S.-based developer of next-generation additive manufacturing methods, has formally launched Matrix6D, a modular, reconfigurable additive manufacturing platform designed to beat one of many trade’s longstanding bottlenecks; scalable manufacturing past prototyping. The disclosing came about at RAPID + TCT 2025.
Matrix6D departs from the fixed-bed printer paradigm and introduces a “swarm-based” structure powered by cellular, magnetically levitated construct platforms. These items autonomously navigate a configurable grid of multifunctional device stations, orchestrated by proprietary software program, enabling high-throughput and totally customizable additive workflows.
“Each buyer we’ve labored with asks the identical query: how will we scale 3D printing past prototyping? Matrix6D is our reply,” mentioned Wealthy Neill, CEO of APES. “It’s a clean-sheet reimagining of the additive manufacturing facility, adaptive, software-defined, and constructed for mass customization and true manufacturing quantity.”
APES designs and manufactures adaptive manufacturing methods for the electronics and automation industries. Combining precision robotics, additive manufacturing, and real-time orchestration software program, APES allows scalable manufacturing workflows from prototyping to quantity manufacturing. The corporate companions with each industrial purchasers and R&D establishments globally.
A brand new class of AM structure
On the core of Matrix6D is a grid-configurable tool-cell system, the place every station operates as a mini-manufacturing unit. Customers can equip these cells with a broad vary of deposition applied sciences, together with aerosol jet, inkjet, direct-write, extrusion, and precision shelling out, in addition to non-additive processes like UV curing, laser sintering, robotic pick-and-place, or vision-based inspection. This format helps hybrid manufacturing workflows inside a single system.
The platform is engineered to assist high-mix, low-volume manufacturing, enabling producers to manufacture totally different elements concurrently with various course of necessities. With machine imaginative and prescient and laser-based self-calibration built-in into every station, Matrix6D can preserve micron-scale precision, even throughout advanced, multi-step processes.
Scalable from lab to manufacturing facility
Because of its parametric design, Matrix6D could be scaled from small 1×2 bench demonstrators to full-scale 5×7 grid arrays and past. Every configuration helps interchangeable toolheads, dynamic process allocation, and parallel recipe execution. This permits producers to run a number of jobs concurrently, a bonus for sectors like semiconductors, wearable electronics, aerospace sensors, and high-performance optics.
At RAPID + TCT 2025, APES demonstrated a 1×2 Matrix6D unit that includes reside materials extrusion, robotic switch between levels, and magnetic construct platform motion. Attendees additionally previewed a digital twin of a 5×7 configuration, showcasing the platform’s orchestration software program and real-time manufacturing visualization.
Addressing challenges within the adoption of printed electronics
Whereas additive manufacturing has made vital inroads in metallic, polymer, and biofabrication functions, additive electronics stays an underdeveloped frontier. Conventional approaches to electronics manufacturing typically wrestle with miniaturization, materials integration, and design flexibility.
Final 12 months, APES partnered with Built-in Deposition Options (IDS) to speed up the event of 3D printed electronics functions, leveraging IDS’s NanoJet know-how. Elsewhere within the subject, Optomec has superior aerosol jet printing for digital parts, upgrading their methods to assist larger throughput and complicated geometries in printed electronics manufacturing.
In Europe, InnovationLab reported a breakthrough in 3D printing multilayer versatile electronics by the SmartEEs2 EU Horizon 2020 mission. Equally, Scrona is bringing ultra-precise AM know-how to marketplace for nanoelectronics after elevating $9.6 million in funding.
Again in 2020, AM electronics supplier Nano Dimension revealed the profitable 3D printing and meeting of a double-sided, ten layer PCB, signaling the maturation of AM in semiconductor contexts. In a latest interview at RAPID + TCT 2024, Nano Dimension’s management emphasised the trade’s transition towards production-ready digital additive manufacturing, a imaginative and prescient carefully aligned with APES’s modular, software-defined strategy.
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Featured Picture exhibits configurations of Matrix 6D adaptive 3D manufacturing facility. Picture through APES.
