Swiss 3D printing start-up Scrona AG has raised $9.6 million in Series A funding to drive further development of the company’s ultra-high resolution 3D printing capabilities, which employ a multi-nozzle printhead designed to improve micro-manufacturing for sectors like semiconductor and display manufacturing.
The funding comes as 3D printing is increasingly being positioned as an additive manufacturing capability for use cases like fast creation of prototypes. In addition to reducing creation time, 3D printing can helps save costs.
Scrona has developed what it claims is the “industry’s first multi-nozzle printhead that can scale to 0.5 μm for 100X higher resolution and 10X higher throughput” than previous offerings.
Patrick Galliker, co-founder and CEO of Scrona, told Fierce Electronics that while 3D printing offers clear advantages in layer-by-layer manufacturing processes versus other technologies like injection molding, it has been limited by inflexible printhead technology.
Scrona is trying to change that with an approach that coordinates simultaneous printing from a large multi-nozzle array that can number into the thousands. It leverages electrostatic ejection, which Galliker said supports extremely fine and precise printing and jetting of different kinds of ink materials, such as metals, dielectrics, organic, and biomaterials, some of which are too viscous to be used in conventional inkjet printheads.
Galliker envisions applications where “thousands of nozzles are working simultaneously on tens of printers” to complete a single job that otherwise would have taken much longer, or perhaps would have been impossible to complete with a wide variety of ink materials involved.
In addition to producing faster and higher resolution printing, this results in a process that allows smaller, faster-drying ink droplets for precise print needs, nanometer-thick control capability and greater flexibility in printhead customization and programmability. Galliker said. For example, that degree of thickness control means that Scrona’s technology could print quantum dot RGB color filters for high-brightness, full-color micro LED displays in augmented reality glasses for gaming and metaverse applications.
“All of this means such a technology may not be just restricted to prototyping applications, but it can actually range all the way to mass production,” Galliker said. He also acknowledged that Scrona may have a window of market opportunity the next few years as supply chain problems have given many manufacturing companies cause to reevaluate their manufacturing processes and invest in capabilities to improve speed and efficiency.
The company’s new funding was led by AM Ventures with syndicate partners including TRUMPF Venture, Verve Ventures and Manz GmbH Management Consulting and Investment. The $9.6 million includes $6.7 million from Series A funding and $2.9 million from a grant by Swiss Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). Scrona was created by spin-off from Swiss research university ETH Zurich, which has done ground-breaking work in many fields, including quantum computing.
Galliker said Scrona has developed a prototype printer and that it is collaborating with an electronics sector partner to make more prototypes to put in the hands of manufacturing companies.