I’m quite comfortable saying ‘never’ in the case of most semiconductors.
The equipment and process steps used in making a leading edge semi are so incredibly complex they’ll never be done by additive manufacturing. The A7 processor that powers Apples newest iPad is 1 cm square and has over a billion transistors on it. Critical layer transistors have feature sizes of 28 nanometers. The fabrication facility it’s built in cost Samsung over 3 billion dollars to build. The air in the fabrication areas is the cleanest in the world, as even the smallest little particle of dust can make the end-product useless.
I’m very, very comfortable in saying never. Additive manufacturing is a wonderful process and will enable many, many things. But there’s also a lot of hype in it, and there’s an awful lot that it will never be able to do.
Affordable “printing” at the molecular level is coming within a few decades. Within 5-10 years for researchers. The pieces are falling into place at an exponential rate.
Unless, of course, the idiots running this planet bring on a new stone age...
640k ought to be enough memory for anybody. -Bill Gates
I’m not so sure the printing part of that is so unobtainable...but scanning tech certainly needs to be a lot better to copy semiconductor devices,