Engineers at The University of Texas at Austin are developing a new 3D printing method called Holographic Metasurface Nano-Lithography (HMNL), aimed at making electronics packaging for semiconductor chips faster, more efficient, and environmentally sustainable.
“Our goal is to fundamentally change how electronics are packaged and manufactured,” said Michael Cullinan, an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and lead of the project. “With HMNL, we can create complex, multimaterial structures in a single step, reducing production time from months to days.”
The research team includes collaborators from the University of Utah, Applied Materials, Bright Silicon Technologies, Electroninks, Northrop Grumman, NXP Semiconductors, and Texas Microsintering, and has secured a $14.5 million grant from DARPA to support the initiative. The project seeks to overcome the limitations of conventional chip manufacturing by leveraging HMNL’s unique capabilities.
Breaking the Limits of Traditional Manufacturing
Conventional electronics manufacturing is slow and labor-intensive, building devices layer by layer. This stepwise approach restricts design freedom and produces significant material waste. HMNL provides a faster, more sustainable solution. Central to the technique are metasurfaces—ultra-thin optical masks that encode dense information. When illuminated, these masks create holograms that shape a hybrid metal-polymer resin into complex 3D structures, achieving detail finer than a human hair.
By streamlining production and cutting waste, HMNL accelerates prototype development while reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing. The team has demonstrated the technology with prototypes across a range of applications: modules for consumer devices, reconfigurable electronics for defense systems, electronics packages that fit into challenging spaces, and active packages that serve both mechanical and electrical functions, such as precise beam-pointing systems for optical applications.
“This isn’t just about making electronics faster or cheaper; it’s about unlocking new possibilities,” Cullinan said.
Micro-Scale Manufacturing
The latest advances from UT Austin reveal a larger shift in additive manufacturing: micro- and nano-scale production is moving from slow, sequential processes to high-speed, geometry-rich, and scalable fabrication platforms.
A similar leap is visible in the development of 3D printing by rapid solvent exchange (3DPX) from University of Cambridge, Chapman University, and Hongik University researchers. Designed for producing ultra-thin fibers as small as 1.5 µm, 3DPX instantly solidifies extruded polymers, enabling long, high-aspect-ratio fibers that conventional methods struggle to achieve. This approach opens scalable pathways for biologically inspired structures in soft robotics, medical scaffolding, and advanced composites.
Elsewhere, Stanford’s roll-to-roll CLIP (r2rCLIP) shows how continuous, automated workflows can push microfabrication into true industrial territory. By transforming the CLIP process into a production-line system that prints, washes, cures, and collects parts without manual intervention, r2rCLIP achieves throughput of up to one million microscale particles per day—a dramatic improvement over traditional micro-printing.
The 3D Printing Industry Awards are back. Make your nominations now.
Do you operate a 3D printing start-up? Reach readers, potential investors, and customers with the 3D Printing Industry Start-up of Year competition.
To stay up to date with the latest 3D printing news, don’t forget to subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter or follow us on Linkedin.
Featured image shows Silver patterning. Photo via The University of Texas at Austin.
