Defense Distributed Is The Greatest

[Tellos Athenaios]

Wow. Imagine the computer parts you could make with this stuff.

The parts might be big at first but you could print hundreds of chips and essentially create a super computer.

Eh no. The problem with "big" is not just that you need a lot of space, but also that there is physically more stuff of which you need to coerce electrons to do your bidding. Coercing takes power, which means heat, which means coolers. Additionally longer wires have long propagation delays, which means lower clock speeds, which means less bang per buck of electricity bill and less performance. Additionally the bigger package, thermal and power enveloppes mean that even relatively straightforward electronics won't "fit" in the packages we currently expect.

You need semi-conductors, and you need them to be tiny (order of magnitude of now more than a few tens of nm) because you need to cram in millions of them. Then you need to have good switching properties for your semi conductors, which also means longevity and longevity of semi-conductors is not improved by applying more force (more power) or running at higher temps (melting). You also have industrial specs to contend with which may require typically -45°C to 80°C ambient temperature operating range, even for CPU's.

For modern CPU's we are currently down to such a scale that only a few atoms of Si can fit together in the wire (22nm) and the material has to be subjected to quite some special treatment to achieve this (basically "stretching" the atoms). Parts are cut out by means of intense (i.e. human-frying) UV radiation, and doping the semi-conductors is a lot trickier at that scale as traditional doping would not yield sufficient conductivity at all when the semi-conductor is switched "on". Try injection-printing that.

You could print a house or a car if you like, maybe you fancy building a corporate jet or a spaceshuttle. The only limit is the size of the printer and the material for the printer itself.

But even that can be overcome with some clever CAD design (or download someone elses)

Not if you need the thing to behave as "a solid thing". That is traditionally overcome with welding, but how will 3d printed stuff take to industrial welding? That's a major headache with current aerospace techniques already given the operating parameters the parts are subjected to.