Superior Printed Digital Options (APES), a U.S.-based developer of next-generation additive manufacturing programs, has formally launched Matrix6D, a modular, reconfigurable additive manufacturing platform designed to beat one of many business’s longstanding bottlenecks; scalable manufacturing past prototyping. The revealing happened 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 models autonomously navigate a configurable grid of multifunctional software stations, orchestrated by proprietary software program, enabling high-throughput and absolutely 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,” stated 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 programs 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 shoppers 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 meting 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 completely 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 complicated, multi-step processes.
Scalable from lab to manufacturing facility
Due to its parametric design, Matrix6D will be scaled from small 1×2 bench demonstrators to full-scale 5×7 grid arrays and past. Every configuration helps interchangeable toolheads, dynamic job 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 stay 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 important 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 expertise. Elsewhere within the area, Optomec has superior aerosol jet printing for digital elements, upgrading their programs to assist larger throughput and complicated geometries in printed electronics manufacturing.
In Europe, InnovationLab reported a breakthrough in 3D printing multilayer versatile electronics by way of the SmartEEs2 EU Horizon 2020 challenge. Equally, Scrona is bringing ultra-precise AM expertise 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 business’s transition towards production-ready digital additive manufacturing, a imaginative and prescient carefully aligned with APES’s modular, software-defined method.
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Featured Picture reveals configurations of Matrix 6D adaptive 3D manufacturing facility. Picture by way of APES.
