Comments on: How do you make a fuel cell? Print it

South San Francisco start-up develops money-saving technique for producing mechanical components: Use industrial printers.
Photos: Printing small parts

[Blito]

One microchip costs a grain of rice to create

I recently read on IBM's website that one microchip costs about the same to produce a grain of rice.
Maybe it's expensive to produce a motherboard but not a microchip according to IBM.

Depends on chip

Chips with few transistors are referred to as "popcorn" in the
industry because they're so cheap to make. But Pentiums aren't in
that class. They do cost a lot to make, mainly because a good
percentage of them don't work. They say that if you know a
manufacturer's yield, you know their profits because the yields are
so low.

[Brockleybadger]

QinetiQ have been doing this for years

QineTiq the spin off Science Labs for the UK Ministry of Defence have been using this technique of fabrication for some years now.

[Bobbias]

But are they commercially visible?

If nobody knows about them, then they're not going to go to them, plus, it sounds like this would be more meant for experimentation than openly creating large amounts of product for sale...