PCB fab on a desktop

Created three years ago, New York City-based startup BotFactory finalized and ramped up its production of a desktop multilayer PCB printer back in 2014, during a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Last month, the company completed a $1M seed round of financing led by New York Angels, one of the largest Angel Investor groups in the World. The funding will help the startup expand its sales and marketing efforts, while continuing product development.

At Electronica, the company was demonstrating its Squink PCB printer, a unit that not only can print on different substrates to create multilayered rigid and flexible circuits, but whose printing head can then be swapped for a pick & place head to populate the printed board. Here it won €50,000 from the Electronica FastForward Competition organized by Elektor magazine.

Key IP for the company's success are the various ink chemistries necessary to design conductive traces, solder pads or to isolate one trace from another across multiple layers with insulating material.

For precise component alignment, on-board computer vision corrects offsets and rotation errors of the parts on the pick & place head before they are placed on the PCB.

Visit the BotFactory at www.botfactory.co

This article originally appeared on Embedded's sister site, EDN: “Desktop PCB startup on-track.”