The True Benefits of Printed Electronics

In this episode, we are very excited to have Jesus Zozaya, CEO of Voltera, and Matt Ewertowski, product manager at Voltera. We will discuss pushing the boundaries in electronics design through printed electronics.

Join us and together let’s discover the many benefits of printed electronics from expedited prototyping, proof of concept, and academic research.

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Show Highlights

• Introduction to Jesus Zozaya, CEO of Voltera, and Matt Ewertowski, product manager at Voltera
• Jesus takes the lead in explaining what Voltera does and introduced their first product – V-one
• Matt explains the difference between Printed Electronics and additive manufacturing process
• Electronics printer pushes the limits and welcomes new possibilities and opportunities for new materials in the electronic design space
• Voltera designed NOVA (their second product) with users in mind, they created a tool that all electrical engineers can utilize regardless of their skills in material science
• Can you do stack-ups using printed electronics?
• Jesus talks about a customer who created heaters directly on the drone’s wings to melt the ice when flying in cold temperature
• A Voltera customer printed electronics directly on a textile (face mask) that will allow a smartphone app to track the level of CO2 on the face mask
• Mark dives deep into the capabilities of NOVA
• Who is the target market for V-one and how does it differentiate from NOVA
  • The V-one is seen to be utilized more for prototyping, meanwhile, NOVA is popular with academic and R and D research
• Printed electronics do not replace traditional marketing, but it aids to expedite the process of getting the proof of concept done

Links and Resources

• Connect with Jesus Zezoya on LinkedIn
• Connect with Matt Ewertowski on LinkedIn
• Visit Voletra’s website
• Related Podcast Episodes:
  • 3D Printed Circuit Boards for Fast Prototyping
  • The Promising and Challenging Future of 3D Printed Electronics
  • Materials Science and Manufacturing of Better PCB

Connect with Zach Peterson on LinkedIn

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Transcript:

Matt Ewertowski:

We've tried to create a tool in NOVA that would allow an electrical engineer, somebody who doesn't necessarily have a material science PhD, right? Someone who doesn't look at a data sheet, looking at viscosity numbers or trying to figure out what nozzle diameter they need to use and all this kind of stuff. We want to give that type of developer the ability to access this technology so at least they can begin working with these technologies and see that printed electronics doesn't necessarily have to be this gigantic, scary world that you have to row into with no idea where you're going. It can be fairly accessible.

Zach Peterson:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Altium OnTrack podcast. I'm your host, Zach Peterson. Today, we are talking with two new guests on the podcast. We're talking with Jesus Zozaya, CEO of Voltera, and Matt Ewertowski, product manager at Voltera. For those of you who pay attention to printed electronics, you may know the name Voltera. For everyone else, I think this is going to be a great opportunity to learn about an innovative company in this space, and I hope you'll all enjoy. Jesus, Matt, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jesus Zozaya:

Thank you so much for having us.

Matt Ewertowski:

Thanks, Zach.

Zach Peterson:

Absolutely. Absolutely, yes. Glad you're both here. Well, we talk about printed electronics and additive at times on this podcast, and I think for a lot of folks it is either a bit abstract or seems to have too high of a barrier to entry. Why don't you tell us all what Voltera does, and what makes you different from some of the other options that may be a bit higher barrier to entry?

Jesus Zozaya:

Okay. I can start with explaining about what Voltera does. So at the end of the day, we are providing tools to catalyze innovation and remove barriers to entry. So, our first product was the V-One. It launched in 2015 as a desktop-sized tool. It's about the size of a laptop, and it allows researchers, educators, engineers to prototype electronics at their desk, and go from essentially an idea in their head to some type of functional prototype in about an afternoon. That was our first product, which we launched as a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter. And then since then, we've been iterating a lot on the technology. And actually, just last year we launched our new product called NOVA, which is a much larger machine with more capabilities and a slightly different market. But, yeah, at the day, it's tools that allow prototyping of different ideas for the, I guess, electronics or added electronics space. And then, Matt, do you want to explain the printed electronics versus additive?

Matt Ewertowski:

Yeah, sure. I think it's really interesting when you were introducing it, Zack, that you said printed electronics. A lot of people see them as abstract or having a high barrier to entry, because this is actually an ideal place for Voltera to be, I think. As Jesus was describing, really what we do is we bring down those barriers to entry. We make these technologies, which are very powerful, we make them accessible to the average engineer, right? So with our first product, the V-One, what we were doing was we were taking printed electronics technologies and bundling them in a way that we could produce something familiar to the average engineer. A PCB, something that every electrical engineer should already be familiar with. But then with this new product, NOVA, over the last seven years, I guess, of producing products to help design electronics faster, we got more and more exposed to the challenges with trying to get into making these printed electronics devices. And that's the problem that NOVA is really looking to solve. So when you're thinking about additive electronics, printed electronics, whatever term it is that you might want to use, it's really just about taking electronic materials and creating these devices in an additive rather than a subtractive way, which is turning the paradigm of electronics manufacturing on its head. But today, I think thanks to our products, it's much more accessible than it's ever been before.

Zach Peterson:

So, I think when people say printed electronics, right? I know that it brings up the additive imagery. But really, you guys aren't necessarily focused on the same types of processes that are used in additive. Is that correct, or is it a new spin on old additive processes that are used for metal deposition of printed circuits?

Matt Ewertowski:

Gotcha. So Zach, when you're talking about additive, you're talking about what most people would call 3D printing, right? Those two terms, they oftentimes do get conflated, right? 3D printing typically will suggest, or additive manufacturing, will suggest what is primarily structural additive manufacturing. Meaning, I am trying to put down metal or I'm trying to put down wood fiber in some cases, or plastics, to create something from a blueprint instead of starting with a block and then taking it away, right? When we talk about printed electronics, printed electronics are somewhat distinct from 3D printing. It's still a sister technology, but they do fall under the additive technology umbrella, right? With printed electronics, you're still starting from a digital file and you're creating from nothing, essentially, the electronic device, right? However, with printed electronics, or I guess, yeah, with printed electronics as you typically call it, you're doing more than just structure, right? The key innovation with the materials that we use is that they're not just there to provide that structure or that skeleton like you would see with something that's an FDM-printed looks-like model, right?

Well, what these materials allow you to do is actually to add function. So not only is this printed line structurally sound and it adheres to the board and everything, but also now it has electrical conductivity. And with printed electronics, it goes far beyond conductivity, actually. Which is something that once you're just introduced to it, you might start to realize, which is conductivity is just one of the many functions that these types of materials could have. There's also semiconducting materials as well. There's insulating materials. There's temperature-sensitive. It really runs the gamut of whatever it is that you'd want these materials to do. When we talk about the 3D element, I'd say that printed electronics primarily is more of a 2.5D type of printing. You are still printing on a bare substrate and giving it some thickness, but you're more concerned about the 2D layout. And that really comes from how electronics design is typically done, right? Circuit boards are fundamentally stacked 2D devices, right? That you interconnect, but each layer in itself is designed in a 2D way. Does that give you a picture of where printed electronics would land?

Zach Peterson:

I think it does. I think once you say, "Well, it's essentially additive of the circuits onto a plain or substrate," people can get their head around it. And at that point you could say, "Well, it could be unique substrates. They could be probably rigid or flexible." And then you brought up the materials, which I've always found extremely interesting in the additive space, and I think that's one of the critical things that's needed to broaden the applicability of additive electronics. And you brought up semiconductors, so now you're talking active circuits or you're talking about active devices, sensors, whether they're chemical sensors or some other type of sensor. I think at that point, once you have a system where you can bring in those unique materials, the possibilities of what you can do either for research or industry really broaden out.

Matt Ewertowski:

Absolutely. It's-

Jesus Zozaya:

Yeah, absolutely. By far, with our first product, the most common or the most active users are the ones that took a look at our machine and decided to venture off the beaten path and work with their own materials. They were very much trying to push the limits of what the machine could do, using all types of different materials from different brands, different viscosities, different particle sizes, and essentially just putting it in there and seeing what happened. And that was exactly for what you said, because it unlocks different possibilities. You'll have materials that are conductive or resistive, that have more of the dialectic properties. The other thing that people like to change is not just the material that they're printing with, but also the material that they're printing on. So whether it's FR-4, that's the standard one, but we've also had a lot of our customers printing on Kapton MPT. Some of them are getting really adventurous and printing circuits on glass, or even wooden veneers and stuff like that, which is very interesting to see. Because printing on wood might be a bit of a novelty right now, where it's like, "Okay, that's cool and it's interesting," but you never know where those ideas can snowball a couple of years down the road.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, I agree with you, especially when you say printing on wood. But one thing you brought up that's interesting is printing on glass, and that brings up this whole other field of transparent electronics. And transparent electronics is something that I have been involved in at my time doing research at a university, but we were doing it with FTO on glass. And so it's all rigid and could be more conductive, but it's not conductive enough for some applications. And so with this, it sounds like you could take a unique ink, that's much more conductive, maybe it's a nanoparticle ink, maybe it's carbon nanotube ink, something like this, and you could do something really unique on not just glass, but maybe a flexible substrate like PET.

Matt Ewertowski:

There is a lot of interest, I think, even currently in, for example, silver nanowire alternatives to ITO and these types of coding materials, which, like you said, CNTs, carbon nanotubes, that could be used that still give you that electrical conductivity. And that really gestures towards the incredibly broad range of potential applications that printed electronics can bring to product development. But one of the challenges that we've really seen in the past, even ourselves with getting into the space of printed electronics, is that breadth. It adds a level of complexity that for most people to even get started with additive or printed electronics, it's very, very challenging. So, really what we've tried to do is we've tried to create a tool in NOVA that would allow an electrical engineer, somebody who doesn't necessarily have a material science PhD, right? Someone who doesn't look at a data sheet, looking at viscosity numbers or trying to figure out what nozzle diameter they need to use and all this kind of stuff.

We want to give that type of developer the ability to access this technology so at least they can begin working with these technologies and see that printed electronics doesn't necessarily have to be this gigantic, scary world that you have to row into with no idea where you're going. It can be fairly accessible. And even, you can create printed analogs of the things that you're already somewhat familiar with, like a flexible circuit can be printed in a very straightforward way on PET as well, right? So, really by trying to make that materials accessibility forefront with our printers, we think that we can reach as broad an audience as possible. So, hopefully, the conversation around printed electronics can shift from being, "What are all these things that could one day in the far future be possible?" to more or less being, "What is it that today you could use flexible electronics or stretchable electronics, or biocompatible electronics to enhance your products, to enhance those devices that you actually want to get out to market?"

Zach Peterson:

So there's a couple threads there, I think, to pursue, but one of them you brought up, doing a printed analog of something you're already familiar with, and I think the next question that someone might ask with that type of product is, "How do they stack up? How do they compare?" You can do multi-layer, let's say, flex boards with polyamide. Can you do the same with a printed electronics?

Matt Ewertowski:

It's actually an interesting question, because while printed electronics, they're still an electronics manufacturing technique, they're not a replacement for the traditional stuff, right? There are new ways that you would have to use this. So actually, I know that there are... I believe it was Altium 2020 where you guys actually released some crossover printing capabilities for printed electronics, and that's typically how you would do the multi-layer. So you're limited to the four-layer stack. That said, the materials benefits that you can get through printing resistive elements, or you could print temperature sensors, that means that you're using it for particular types of devices, right? So could you do a two to four-layer stack-up of a flexible circuit board with printed electronics? Yeah, you could. You would definitely need to think about how that's done in context of the materials that are available, but could you then venture off into... When we're talking about micro-videos and really high-density electronics that you're used to with the traditional electronics, that's not really the area that printed electronics is best served today, I think. Jesus, did you have anything to add there?

Jesus Zozaya:

I was going to say that I think where printed electronics really shines is when you start thinking a little bit on the unconventional side of things, where you're not limited to... Right now, in more conventional thinking, you have electronics that are going to end up in some type of board, and then you're going to put that board in a box. And where I think it gets interesting is when you start breaking that mentality and thinking about, "Where can I put electronics?" So one of our customers, he's a researcher at York University, and what he was working on was printing... So there's a problem, I guess, with drones. So drones, the ones that fly up in the air, where in cold temperatures, their condensation starts to accumulate on the wings and it freezes. And that weight of the water can end up having an impact on the drone, because maybe it uses more battery or maybe it just can't get up or whatever.

So one of the things that they were experimenting with was printing some resistive traces, so essentially create heaters directly on the wings of the drone so that it would melt the ice, essentially. So that's an interesting application where you're not putting your electronics, again, rigid board, in a box. It's more like the electronics you're blending the electrical and the mechanical functions of the product together, instead of, "Hey, this is all the mechanical stuff and it's done by the mechanical engineer, and then this is all the electrical stuff done by the electrical engineer," and then somehow they meet in the middle. Here, it's a much more integrated design that could be really interesting, I guess.

Matt Ewertowski:

Oh, all I was going to say is that I love that term, with the integrated electronics, because it really is the true benefit of printed electronics down the road. That it's not about electronics being separate from the devices or the things that we work with every day. Electronics are embedded into your clothes, into the structure of the buildings that we occupy. That's the end game.

Zach Peterson:

So I was just going to say that that application sounds very interesting on a drone. I'm sure the surfaces are probably not perfectly flat. I'm wondering, did they print this resistive heater directly onto the wings or was it onto a film that then goes onto the wings?

Jesus Zozaya:

So this particular example, they were actually printing on a 3D-printed air foil. So the surface itself was slightly curved. It wasn't a very aggressive curve, but it wasn't flat, I guess, is the best way of describing it. And yeah, again, he was very representative of most of our customers in the sense that they are pushing the limits, and sometimes breaking stuff. And sometimes they tell us, "Hey, we just broke this thing," and we're like, "Yeah. Don't worry, we got you covered." But yeah, very much there. It seems that as soon as you give a piece of equipment to a researcher, they will figure out how to break it that day. And it seems like if they're not doing it, they're probably not working hard enough. I don't know what it is, but it seems like they're always pushing the limits.

Zach Peterson:

I can't tell you the number of times I've broken stuff doing research, so I get that.

Jesus Zozaya:

Yeah.

Zach Peterson:

Another thing that I think this brings up that's always been really interesting to me, and there are other companies in the additive space who are investigating this, is transparent antennas or printed antennas on curved surfaces. Have you guys investigated that, or have customers investigated that?

Jesus Zozaya:

I actually do have one example, Matt, I was going to say related there, was another customer out of the university in Spain, what they were doing was, COVID hits, everybody's wearing masks, and then there's a concern, which I didn't know, but I guess there was a concern of rebreathing a lot of the CO2 that you're exhaling. So what they developed was a mask that had a printed... I believe it was an NFC antenna that would essentially allow you to, you're walking in the street, you grab your phone, you bring it up your mouth, you scan it, and then it tells you... It's a sensor, essentially. Just monitoring the levels of CO2, I guess, from a safety perspective. So that is an example where... Printing electronics directly onto textiles, I guess, which is interesting as well.

Zach Peterson:

Printing on the textiles, that's very interesting if you ask me. I've talked to some people in the past, one of them is actually from the university I was at, and I asked them about how they're fabricating on textiles. And they have some proprietary process that they use, and they had never brought up anything like using maybe a desktop 3D printer or even maybe an industrial 3D printer. So that's really interesting, to think that you could get conductive traces, which I think intuitively shouldn't be able to have a supportive enough substrate on fabric or on textiles, and then you can do this and it actually works.

Matt Ewertowski:

Yeah. Well, I can definitely take that one. It's actually an area that I'm very interested in as well, I think, partially because we see so much excitement in this field from our customers. If we're looking at one of the most, I guess, prolific areas that our customers for NOVA in particular are interested in, it's definitely medical and wearables. And it's one of those things that if you were to put electronics directly interfacing with the body in a much less invasive way, you could think of all the potential benefits that that could bring for preventative medicine as opposed to diagnostic medicine, where you're really dealing with trying to solve problems after the fact, right? If we're talking about printing on fabrics and how it's actually done, there's two main ways that you could give it a shot and one of them is actually not all that complicated.

So our tools are these kind of desktop direct-write systems, right? Printed electronics at scale, you'd typically be doing something like screen printing. But in both approaches, essentially what you do is you'll just put the conductive patterns directly onto a elastomeric substrate, something like a TPU or a PDMS. And then you would typically heat-laminate that directly to the fabric, and that is a pretty straightforward process. Now, you do have to do some encapsulation after the fact with further TPU. Especially right now in wearable electronics, there's this kind of golden target rule of 100 wash cycles. To be honest, I don't know how many times you've put your jacket into a washing machine, but it's probably on single digits. But it's still one of those things that people are really trying to hit. And the other way that you would do it, aside from that TPU lamination type of approach, is that you would try and print directly on the fabric. And that would require a different class of materials. Typically, lower conductivity.

So if you're trying to do something like a wearable heater, which is something that actually... There's this company, Butler. I believe that they did a collaboration with ACI Materials to demonstrate a heated jacket, which is very, very cool, where that heater is directly integrated into the jacket itself. I think there's a lot of these cool applications that we're going to see further on. And especially in the medical area, where you could be putting electrodes into clothing in a way that, for example, monitors almost any kind of bio signal that you would want, right? The Apple Watch now can tell you if you're going to have some kind of cardiac health risk down the road just by monitoring lots of data over time. Now imagine if you could roll that out into sweat composition or something similar, right? There's just so much data out there that we could be using, that would help a lot with preventative medicine.

Zach Peterson:

I have to say, my wife would love to have socks with a built-in heater. So if anyone out there is listening and wants to try it out, contact these guys because I would be your first customer. But just to back up for a moment, this is all very interesting, and I get that you're making printed electronics more accessible and trying to, I guess, remove or reduce the barrier to entry. But what really drove you to get into this and found this company, beyond just expanding the accessibility of printed electronics?

Jesus Zozaya:

I would say, when the company started, there was the explosion of 3D printing, where it was a technology that was limited to industry, and all of a sudden we started seeing a lot of more of the... Not personal level at that point. It was just much more affordable tools that were coming out, and we're like, "Okay, these are really good. They're taking plastic and converting it, and coming up with some type of mechanical object." And we thought that there should be an electrical version as well, and that's essentially what got the ball rolling. And since then, it's been a lot of just tugging on that thread and really learning all the advantages and the possibilities of doing things in an additive manner, basically.

Zach Peterson:

So what are the, I guess, highest-level capabilities of your equipment? How dense can you print individual lines? What resolution do you have? What are some of the technical specs that you guys can hit?

Matt Ewertowski:

Sure. For NOVA, with NOVA we've really reworked our dispensing technology in a lot of ways from our first product, the V-One. With NOVA, thanks to some of the innovations that we've put forward, like realtime pressure feedback control for the fluid, along with much better height control, a camera system that allows you to get really precise alignment. In fact, there's a paper that was just published from a group at MIT, where they got about 15 micron alignment. 15 micrometer alignment for these two patterns that they're trying to print, which was really, really cool. With NOVA, what you can typically do, depending on the material, it would be about 100 micrometer line width. The spacing itself, it just comes down to your design requirements, right? We've got that camera for alignment that's built in. It's like a microscope camera. It gives you about 17 micrometer resolution, so you can place things pretty close.The main thing is just choosing a material that will give you the best results, right? With our system, when we ship it out to our customers, we actually include a conductive ink sample from ACI Materials that has a really good printing resolution, good line width resolution, and high conductivity.

Not all materials are going to have the same type of line width characteristics, and that's where, I guess, some of the fun part of printed electronics comes in. What we do, though, is that with our system, I guess we try and take a black-box approach to it in a way. Because we have a feature I haven't seen in any other tool, which is a semi-automated calibration procedure, is what we call it. It's not that fancy a term, but really what it does is that it uses the camera system to take images of what you're printing, and the user can qualitatively determine how they would like to improve the print and then it iterates automatically.Now, for those who might not be familiar with printed electronics systems that have existed in the past, usually if you want to print something, what you need to do is become an expert in printing technology, and that means really getting into the guts of what every little parameter does. With inkjet systems, that means tuning pulse forms, which is actually something going back to how we got into this area.

We investigated inkjet systems really early, and tried building our own too. And how we've got to our technology is through this trial and error of trying all these different systems. But if you're sitting there, trying to trim some trim pots in realtime while looking at the microscope camera feed of droplets ejecting from a nozzle, that's not very user-friendly, right? So our approach, it really takes the user a step back from having to know everything about printing. It just asks you, "How would you like this print quality to improve?" So, max capabilities aside, with Novo, what you're able to do is to get started really quickly, to use these materials that otherwise would take you weeks or even months of designed experiments to try and optimize for your print process in a matter of minutes or hours. So really, when we're talking about the ease of use, that's what we're trying to accomplish with NOVA. The print quality of course is really good, but it's how you get there that we think is where most of the benefit lies.

Zach Peterson:

I have always said that some of these newer, more advanced technologies don't really proliferate until you make the user experience easy, and possibly even fun. So that's great to hear, that you've focused on making the user experience much easier, because then I think it makes it much easier to jump in and learn how to use it and get started experimenting with things. And on that note, I'm wondering, who are the major users of this product? Is this academics who have time to fiddle with it in the lab? Is it people in industry that are just using it for prototyping? Where do you see this product and these processes fitting in with the traditional electronics development process?

Matt Ewertowski:

Jesus, do you want to take the one or should I take it?

Jesus Zozaya:

You can go for it.

Matt Ewertowski:

Sure. Okay. So we now have these two products out in the market. We've got the V-One that's primarily for PCB prototyping. I mean, we're using printed electronics technologies, but at the end of the day these are electrical engineers primarily who are trying to develop a proof of concept really quickly. A prototype at their desk, right? There's also a growing number of educators that are using the V-One to try and teach the next generation of engineers how to get that hands-on experience that, usually, you won't get until the workforce. So that's a very exciting area for the V-One. Now, when we're talking about NOVA, we've actually seen a bit of a split. So, we have quite a few academic researchers. We do think that there's a lot of innovation to be done in printed electronics now in the device manufacturing side of things. And academic, there's a lot of interest from academics on that side, but we also have what I'd call industrial researchers.

So if you think of any consumer electronics company that's sufficiently large enough, they would have somewhere an R&D group that's working on, "What is the next technology that we're going to be releasing in three to five years?" So we've seen a lot of interesting potential applications from there as well. Unfortunately, the academics are much more likely to tell you what they're working on than some of the companies out there that aren't quite so fond of telling me what's next. So, unfortunately, not so much info on the cool applications from that end, but just the names of the companies themselves suggest that there's going to be some interesting things coming down in the next couple of years. On the academic side, though, like Jesus was saying before, these customers are the ones that when you deliver something to them, they will find out immediately how to go beyond what you told them was possible. And that is what keeps us nimble, I think. It keeps us having to be on our toes as well, and that's how we develop the next things that we release.

Jesus Zozaya:

Keeps up young.

Matt Ewertowski:

What was that?

Jesus Zozaya:

It keeps us young, basically.

Matt Ewertowski:

Yeah, it keeps us young.

Zach Peterson:

I think that feedback from innovative users of the product who are really pushing the boundaries is so important to continue innovating, because how else are you going to be able to figure out what the next roadblock is? And it seems to me that traditional PCB fabrication should really do more of that. And I'm not trying to speak ill of manufacturers here or anything, but I think we're a little too conservative in the PCB manufacturing realm, and I've mentioned this to other guests on the podcast. Whereas with printed electronics, you're getting that feedback directly from academics who are taking the product to its limits and beyond. Would you maybe agree with that statement, that traditional PCB manufacturing is a little too conservative in terms of what they do and in terms of innovation?

Jesus Zozaya:

I think I would agree with that, for sure. I think, I mean, if you're producing stuff in high volumes, it's going to come down to one thing, and that's price. And there's a lot of setup costs, a lot of money that has been invested in existing equipment and all that, and the appetite to try something else for something that may not be a guaranteed return, I get it. I understand why there might be no appetite there. It all comes down to, and we've mentioned this a couple times, it's the accessibility, right? How easy is it to adopt a new technology and get that ball rolling?

Matt Ewertowski:

I think there's definitely been some-

Jesus Zozaya:

Well, then on that note-

Matt Ewertowski:

Sorry, just-

Jesus Zozaya:

Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Matt.

Matt Ewertowski:

Just to add on to that, especially in Ontario, where we are, we have a couple companies who are trying to... Canada's not particularly well-known as being a PCB manufacturing center, which means that you need to be a little bit more competitive in some way to get that business. And with some of those companies, especially in the area that we're in, we see that they're more willing to adopt different ways of doing things. Some of the customers that we were talking with very early on that helped us develop this printed electronics tool actually did come from the PCB manufacturing side of things. But more broadly, like Jesus was saying, in general, absolutely. If a company messes up your PCB order, you're not going to typically go back and spend months and months with them fixing the process. You'll find somebody else, right? Somebody else who can do it well.

Zach Peterson:

That's fair. And I do understand the constraints there. Now, that brings up another question, which is the scalability of the processes that you're using and maybe just other printed electronics processes in general. I know that something like... What is it? Gravure or screen printing is probably a bit more highly scalable. Do you see your process being scalable to that point, where maybe it could offer a more advanced capability compared to these other high-volume processes, and that could make it more competitive at a higher-volume level? Or do you just see this maybe more advancing in terms of capability, but maybe being a low-volume, high-mix type of process?

Matt Ewertowski:

I could try and take the first stab at this one. But what I would say is that the same way that I said before that printed electronics and traditional subtractive electronics, they coexist, it's the same way that I would personally look at our tools. They're not intended to be a replacement for the gravure or the screen printing, the high-volume printed electronics manufacturing technologies. But what they allow you to do is really quickly get from an idea to a proof of concept. Something that in a no-tooling approach, in a digital manufacturing approach, has a huge advantage over more of the high-volume manufacturing technologies. So I think every technology has its niche, right? And ours is really helping you get to that first proof of concept, which then you will be able to pass along to the high-volume manufacturing. And because with NOVA, you're using screen-printable type materials, which is something you won't see, for example, with inkjet materials. If you're talking about manufacturing, screen printing is still 98% of all printed electronics devices at scale, right?

So by using the same material set with our NOVA printer, we're able to make that transition very, very easy. To the point of high-custom type of applications. There has been some interest in there as well. I think it's just a general value prop for additive manufacturing. And printed electronics falls under that as well, but I'd focus more on that. What is it that our technology does really, really well, and that's getting you from zero to one. Jesus, do you have any thoughts on that one, too?

Jesus Zozaya:

The only thing really to add there is that, yeah, like Matt said, that screen printing is 98% there, but screen printing, I guess, assumes that the substrate is flat. And I think, again, it works really, really well and under certain conditions, but then as soon as you start changing a couple parameters, that's where I think where technologies like ours could shine. Where, again, when you're doing unusual materials on unusual surfaces, that's, I think, where the niche could be there.

Zach Peterson:

So I guess to continue on that and maybe poke a little deeper on the scalability, it seems to me that if someone is going to use this type of technology to develop something innovative and they want to eventually scale it, they should be operating under the constraints imposed by the traditional screen printing process, and try to design within that. And I think my approach, if I were to do this, would be to use this technology for iterative prototyping, where it's continuously improving the product. Because it sounds to me that if the first prototype doesn't work, hey, just toss it in the garbage and do a new one. And it's not going to take that long. You don't have to send it out. You can do it all there on your desktop. You can immediately test it, and then continuously improve it until you get it to the point where it's ready to scale. Is that a fair way to approach using this?

Matt Ewertowski:

You've absolutely hit the nail on the head there. One of our beta customers, they were trying to iterate through a particular... It was a pretty complex design, but every time they needed to print it, it only took something like 30 seconds, right? Now, if you were to imagine, if I needed to get a screen done every time I need to change the design, I would be waiting a week, paying a couple hundred bucks. And for one-off, that doesn't really make that big of an impact, but they actually ran through something like 1,000 iterations of this particular design, which would just be... The cost would be exorbitant, right? The amount of time you'd spend trying to go through all those design iterations. There's just a level where it's just not possible with tooling-based technologies, right? So I think you're absolutely right.

Zach Peterson:

And then with integration into larger industrial-level additive and assembly processes, there's automated pick and place. There's, I think, multilayer, like we talked about before, and then there's probably just larger things that you could print. Do you guys have any plans to move in that direction and maybe integrate with some of those other processes or tools?

Jesus Zozaya:

I would say at this point we're focused on the low volume, but that is definitely something interesting. I know a lot of our customers have asked, "Hey, your product is great, but just, can you add a pick and place? Can you add something there?" There's a lot of things on people's wishlists, but at the end of the day we just got to take it one day at a time and focus on the most common things and start solving those. But yeah, at this stage, it's more meant on the early-stage prototyping phase, before getting into the big stuff.

Zach Peterson:

Well, as this all develops and you guys see more adoption, we'd love to have you back on in the future. I think we're running low on time, so we're going to wrap it up for now. But Jesus, Matt, I want to thank you both so much for joining us today. This has been extremely interesting, and I hope everyone that's listening will check out the show notes and go learn more about Voltera.

Jesus Zozaya:

Awesome.

Matt Ewertowski:

Thanks so much.

Jesus Zozaya:

Thank you so much, Zach. Thanks for having us.

Zach Peterson:

Thank you. And to everyone that's out there listening, we've been talking with Jesus Zozaya, CEO of Voltera, and Matt Ewertowski, product manager at Voltera. Make sure to check out the links in the show notes. You can learn more about the company and their products. Finally, make sure to subscribe if you're watching us on YouTube. You'll keep up to date with all upcoming episodes and, of course, all of our tutorials. And last but not least, don't stop learning, stay on track, and we'll see you next time.