Jabil Circuit Inc. is the third largest contract manufacturer in the world as a company with $US 18 Billion turnover and over 175,000 employees innovation in manufacturing is of the utmost importance. Girish Wable is a technology, operations, sourcing, innovation and business solutions strategist for Jabil. With more than 18 years of global experience, Girish has experience in electronics manufacturing & integration, high performance coatings, material handling, automation and 3d printing. Here he deatils the company's latest 3D printing exploits.
Are we there yet ? Integrated 3d printing of functionally and cosmetically acceptable products….
For the past year the Engineering and Technology Services team at Jabil has been engaged with a team of researchers from University of South Florida in Tampa. The objective was to explore the state of art in digitally manufactured functionally & cosmetically appealing products. Particularly the team wanted to look at additively manufactured handset covers and antennas, possibly all on the same machine.

Design for the 3D Printed case and antena
Design for the 3D Printed case and antena
Various dielectric materials like ABS, Polycarbonate, Digital ABS and Duraform PA were used to print a simulated handset cover. The conductive patterns of the antennas were printed using conductive pastes and inks with different dispensing or printing techniques using multiple different equipment and applicable conductive materials. Several smoothing steps (mechanical and chemical) were recommended to be included by equipment manufacturers to ensure the antennas could be printed. A novel 3D printed test fixture was fabricated to analyze the RF performance (S11 and radiation patterns) for each type of “printed” antenna and used to compare to known baseline antenna characteristics. Simulations with HFSS were also performed.

3D printed cover with 3D printed antenna in a 3D printed rf test fixture
3D printed cover with 3D printed antenna in a 3D printed rf test fixture
While “functionally acceptable” has a definite set of parameters that as engineers we can put down and hang our hat on, I found out that “cosmetically appealing” is a completely different thing. What we thought as “a imperfect handset cover” in one of the iterations, could be deemed as “cool” by a completely different set of individuals, because the imperfection in that one piece lends itself to be a very personalised or customised feel and look for some.
Can we also introduce such acceptable personalisation functionality, a product tuned to a particular user to their acceptable specifications? What about personalised acceptance of functional performance based on value to the user (pull by consumer) vs a set of standardised specifications (push by the manufacturers)…. Additive manufacturing allows you to be open to such conversations.
The drive through to an “app like” ecosystem with manufactured hardware similar to the software app ecosystem, may have just began were several choices on “operating systems” of additive manufacturing would exist leading upto an infinite number of “app like” customised and personalised hardware to purchase and use from the ecosystem.