Design and Manufacture of 3D-Printed Circuit Boards

In recent years, 3D printing technology was used in electronics mostly for the manufacture of mechanical or packaging parts. In particular, the Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) category, has seen an ever-increasing variety of available materials including electrically conductive filaments. In this work we present several FDM 3D-Printed Circuit Boards (3D-PCBs) and characterize them in several manufacturing conditions. The circuits in question are a set of second order active and passive filters, printed and tested with discrete and integrated components: their characteristics, along with their ideal models, are finally compared. The results of these comparisons show a deviation of the cutoff frequency between 50% and 60%, as well as a non-negligible gain difference for the active filters. 3D-PCBs show a general decrease in performance with respect to ideal models because of several manufacturing non-idealities, such as the estimated 20% printing tolerance and the effect of parasitic components within each circuit. These characteristics open to several developments for further work in terms of printing method, materials for conductive traces, and compensation architectures.