Center for BITS and ATOMS (DICE RESEARCH):

This is a long term project I did as Undergraduate Research with the Center for Bits and Atoms in the MIT Media lab.

The project centered around a complete paradigm shift in electronics manufacturing. Currently, electronics are built on printed circuit boards. This is bad for prototyping since an entirely new board has to be made even for small changes, and it is hard to remove and reuse components once they are soldered onto a board.

We created a new system for building circuits, called DICE (Discrete Integrated Circuit Electronics). Essentially they are like LEGO blocks which each carry an electronic component. The intent is to miniaturize these parts so that circuits can be extremely dense. A robot takes a design and a tray of parts, then plugs them together to make a circuit. To change the design, the assembled circuit is re-inserted into the robot, which takes it apart so the individual components can be re-used.

For most of 2022, I came up with a design of thumbnail-sized pieces, which could be connected together to make circuits. I went through multiple iterations and tested a simple circuit assembled out of the pieces. Finally, towards the end I tried to shrink the parts as small as possible using cutting-edge manufacturing techniques such as laser micro machining and electrical discharge machining.

FINAL PRESENTATION:

These are the slides I presented to the group to sum up all of my work: