Boston Micro Fabrication: Mega Results From Producing Micro Parts

With new and innovative techniques for 3D printing/additive manufacturing continuing to emerge, we recently interviewed John Kawola, CEO of Boston Micro Fabrication, a unique company that specializes in (as its name implies), micro components and machines that produce them.

Boston Micro Fabrication (BMF) was co-founded in 2016 by Dr. Nick Fang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Dr. Xiaoning He, a serial entrepreneur. BMF manufactures high-precision micro 3D printers. The company’s microArch system uses a 3D printing approach called PμSL (Projection Micro Stereolithography) that leverages light, customizable optics, a high-quality movement platform, and controlled processing technology to produce accurate and precise high-resolution (2μm printing resolution and +/- 10µm tolerance) 3D prints for product development, research and industrial short run production using polymers and composite materials. Today, BMF is the only industrial 3D printing company that can match the quality of high-resolution injection molding and CNC processing.

John Kawola, BMF’s CEO, should be familiar to readers of MCADCafe, as we have written about him and some of the companies he’s been associated with over the years.

“I’ve actually been in additive manufacturing longer than most people, about 20 years. I was at another MIT startup called Z Corp, which was about 20 years ago. That did very well, and sold the company to 3D Systems. I spent about three years helping Ultimaker build their business in North America, but I was interested in getting back into an early-stage company and saw opportunities with BMF”.

“I wanted to get back into the early stages of an additive manufacturing company, but at the same time, I know that it’s a crowded space. There are lots of companies, and many of them are doing the same thing, whether it’s a desktop 3D printer companies or companies producing very large-scale parts. There’s also several metal companies now, too. What I was really looking for was something that was high value, and a portion of the market that had not been well served in the past. That’s really the whole theme behind our company, and so I was excited to join BMF about a year and a half ago”.

MCADCafe Interviews John Kawola, CEO, Boston Micro Fabrication

“We’re a relatively new company and have operations around the world – in US, China, Japan, and Europe. What we have developed is a platform that produces what we call micro-components. They’re typically components with very high tolerances on the order of tens of microns. And those types of tolerances are typically demanded by industries such as electronics, medical devices, micro-fluidics, drug discovery, and MEMS applications. We believe that these are areas of the market that have not been well served in the past by additive manufacturing, both for prototyping, because it’s hard to prototype something using some of the existing technologies, and potentially for production”.

A Unique Platform for Printing Micro Components

What BMF sells is a 3D printing platform that consists of a line of machines (microARCH) along with materials, and services. Kawola said, “We call our technology PµSL, which stands for Projection Micro-Stereolithography. It’s really a variant of some of the stereolithography and DLP technologies that have been developed in the past. What we do differently is that we add components, we add high precision optics, and have high-precision movement in the X, Y, and Z axes. We have two different printing platforms. One is allows you to get optical resolution down to two microns. In the other one you get optical resolution down to 10 microns, and that’s really beyond the capability of other current additive manufacturing technology”.

As for products that can be produced, Kawola said, “If we think about medical devices, for example, there are endoscopes, scoping instruments for exploratory operations. Typically, the end of an endoscope is a very complex part because you need channels for the camera and channels for the lighting. It has complexity on both sides, and it’s very difficult to actually mold that part, so that’s a great application for the micro technology that we have”.

A second example in medical devices is relatively new and emerging – micro-needle technology. The world is facing the pandemic, and where I think we’re all realizing that’s a traditional method for immunization, which is a needle in a vile, it’s not easy to scale. There have been a number of groups around the world looking at what’s called micro-needle technology, and I think it’s a great example of how the pandemic has pushed a lot of innovation forward, people have been working on these technologies for years, and now there’s a real incentive to move more quickly and deploy”.

“Those are two examples of medical devices. When we think about electronics, just looking at electrical connectors, very small complex electrical connectors, perhaps with features that are on the order of 50 microns, those are all examples of what our platform does well”.

“While both printed circuit boards and chips use a version of a lithography, we’re not printing circuit-boards directly, but we like to think that we’re helping to really enable miniaturization. In a lot of ways, processing power and the miniaturization of processing power has happened faster than the ability to make a package small. Chips are small, and every year or two, they get smaller and smaller, but all chips have to fit into an enclosure or package, and the ability to make something that small is in some ways a constraint to miniaturization, and that’s one of the problems we’re trying to solve”.

The Materialise Partnership

BMF recently formed a partnership with Materialise. As for the reason, Kawola said, “We’d all like to have a software workflow that is free and immediate, but it’s not quite like that. Like most other additive manufacturing processes, we take CAD data, an STL file often as an exported from a CAD platform. Often in additive manufacturing, it needs to be processed in some way, perhaps support structures have to be added, props have to be scaled up or down. We have some of that capability within our own company, but we also have partnered with Materialise and they’ve created a version specifically for our platform, which gives us all that capability to help customers do that pre-processing, but also, just as importantly, preserves the ability to get down to very fine resolution and maintain that accuracy. Sometimes if your processing of the data is not handled well, you lose the ability to create tight tolerances, and Materialise helps with data optimization and maintaining tolerances”.

BMF’s Product and Service Focus

When asked if BMF is primarily a product company or a company where people send their designs for actually manufacturing, Kawola said, “We’re doing a little bit of both, but we’re primarily a product company. We’re selling our platforms to end users, to research institutes, to service bureaus who are printing parts, but we also do some contract manufacturing, primarily in Asia”.

What makes BMF solutions unique and differentiated in the marketplace?

“We do some things uniquely, and some of this is proprietary and there’s intellectual property, where we’ve taken a basic idea that other people are doing, which is essentially taking an imaging platform like DLP, and that’s being done by multiple companies out there such as 3D Systems, Carbon, and Formlabs are all doing it pretty well, and we’ve added other things to it. So again, we’ve added the optics, we’ve added very high-precision movement, and then we’ve added the software, because again, our software to be able to process an image to digitally stitch things together if needed, to preserve accuracy, those are all some of the special elements of our technology that allows us to get the performance that we do”.

Wall Street Loves 3D Printing

It’s no secret that the market for the 3D printing industry is really hot on Wall Street, and anybody who has got a name which says, “I do 3D printing,” they’re going up to Wall Street investors who seem ready to fund anything and everything in this arena. Is BMF getting any solicitations to join the party?

Representative BMF Part Illustrating Micro-Scale Capabilities

According to Kawola, “The capital markets for 3D printing are going through a pretty hot phase right now. The public companies are seeing a run-up in their price, which is great. They’ve been able to do secondary offerings and raise cash. Some of the larger private companies have gone public through some of the SPAC vehicles out there. Admittedly, we’re a bit behind in being an early-stage start-up, building our business, but in general, this is all very good for us because only a few years ago, there were probably only one or two companies in the industry that could make acquisitions. Now there’s many more that have the scale, the cash, and the equity to be able to do that. It’s a $10 billion-plus industry overall, but it’s still pretty small in terms of everybody knowing everyone, and there also has been some recent consolidation. So, when it makes sense we’ll entertain that”.

Challenges Ahead

Kawola said that even though there have been challenges running the company, in the big scheme of things, it’s gone pretty well. “We’ve been successful raising money, we’ve raised money before COVID, which was good. We’re selling the products with a pretty good margin, so we’ve been able to build our company without consuming a lot of cash”.

“Also, I think we do have something unique and different. So when we’re talking to prospects, most of these prospects are pretty well-educated already about what’s possible in additive, so when we’re showing up and showing them a sample, they’re usually pretty impressed, and that starts the sales process, so that has gone pretty well. I think COVID has been a challenge for everyone in how they structure their business. I think some have been affected more than others, certainly, but as an early-stage company, we were not that negatively affected”.

“We started from a very small base and we have been able to build our business pretty successfully. We were pleasantly surprised to be able to place many systems last year because these are relatively expensive systems at over $100,000 apiece. We were really surprised that many customer companies invested without even seeing a machine in person. That usually didn’t happen in the past. Historically, prospects have gone to a trade fair or go to a reseller site, but I think we were able to execute on the sales process and learn pretty quickly how to make samples that was largely unaffected, mail those around the world, talk to people on the phone, and use online meeting tools like Zoom”.

“We created a very well-produced video and showed that to prospects. They found the video informative and interesting, but what we found to be much more impactful was just an informal live demo, literally holding your phone, showing them the machine, opening the door, having them see behind the machine, having them ask questions, in a way have it be so that they’re in the room with you. And we found that to be a pretty effective way to conduct our business. Despite the relative success with video, I think we’re all looking forward, just like the rest of the world, to visiting with customers, going to trade fairs, and just getting out again”.

“To engage with us, the first step in our sales process is by producing a benchmark part for prospective customers. This is actually pretty common in the industry. Just send us a file for the part you want produced, we print the part, and send it to you. Since parts are usually pretty small, we put them in an envelope and send it back to you to evaluate. Our experience has been that nine out of 10 customers are impressed and excited about the benchmark part, and that starts the discussion for further part production or machine purchase”.

“At BMF, we have a team here that’s growing. As an early-stage company, most of the first employees that we’ve hired so far somehow knew each other before from previous engagements, so there aren’t too many employees with no industry experience. I think we have a pretty closely knit team here, so there aren’t too many secrets among us”.

“All things considered, we’re doing well. We launched the product in late 2018 and started shipping in 2019. We’re ramping up pretty quickly and have just reached 100 customers worldwide, so it’s starting to scale, and we’re trying to build the company for the long haul”.

In summary, it looks like Boston Micro Fabrication is making it big by making things small.

For More Information: Boston Micro Fabrication

Tags: 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AM, Boston Micro Fabrication, DPL, John Kawola, Materialize, Projection Micro-Stereolithography, stereolithography, Video Interview

Category: Interview

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