Watch this Talk
09 April 2026 | Tutorial @ 9 AM - 10:20 AM, Open Session
Jarvis Auditorium, Grimes Engineering Center (First Floor)
Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng
Associate Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
University of California, Berkeley
Rapid Design and Printing of MEMS-Like Electronic Materials and Systems
Abstract
Advanced fabrication and manufacturing are rapidly expanding the design space for multi-scale features and complex three-dimensional architectures. However, the direct co-fabrication of structural, dielectric, conductive, and active materials remains a core challenge—especially for systems that must sense, actuate, and respond to electrical, acoustic, or mechanical stimuli. Today’s MEMS technologies rely almost exclusively on cleanroom-based, planar fabrication followed by complex packaging and assembly, and no additive manufacturing approach has yet achieved comparable levels of functional integration. While 3D printing has revolutionized design–manufacturing cycles and enabled rapid iteration, it has largely been limited to structural materials such as plastics and metals.
In this tutorial, I will present new multi-material additive manufacturing strategies that enable high-speed, compositionally precise assembly of diverse material classes within fully three-dimensional architectures. By collapsing fabrication and assembly into a single process, these approaches offer a fundamentally new pathway for creating MEMS-like systems without wafers, masks, or post-processing. These methods enable new material behaviors beyond conventional constitutive limits, including symmetry-breaking piezoelectric effects, electro-acoustic coupling, electro-magnetic waves steering and tailorable actuation and sensing. I will unpack the design protocol, printing and post processing routes that underpin these emerging desktop friendly printing platforms.
The resulting “intelligent solids” embed sensing, actuation, and signal transduction directly within their structure, enabling rapid design iteration and a direct transition from concept to functional product. I will highlight new design and manufacturing routes for rapid printing of electronic components and 3D MEMS devices, with applications in robotic tactile sensing, autonomous path finding, 3D antennas, and real-time texture recognition at the scale of a human fingertip.
In the final part of the tutorial, I will discuss our recent commercialization efforts through Sensetics, Inc., which translates these advances into 3D robotic sensing platforms. These systems offer near-neural-terminal resolution for recording and transmitting distributed tactile information in robotic grippers, surgical tools, wearable interfaces, and remote systems. The engineered materials localize contact, measure three-axis forces, and generate programmable haptic responses—functioning as artificial mechanoreceptors for robotics.
Biography
Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and serves as Co-Director of the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (BSAC). His research focuses on developing advanced additive manufacturing and artificial intelligence–enabled design methods to create materials and structures with controlled 3D microarchitectures and encoded functionalities.
Professor Zheng’s group is a global pioneer in developing 3D printing technologies and materials for electronic and multifunctional systems, including dielectric, conductive, piezoelectric, and structural materials. These capabilities are enabling next-generation sensors, MEMS, transducers, electronics, and robotic systems. Dr. Zheng is also Co-Founder and Scientific Advisor of Sensetics, Inc., a company focused on developing tactile sensing and haptics technologies for humanoid robotics.
Professor Zheng has received multiple prestigious awards, including the DARPA Young Faculty Award, DARPA Director’s Fellowship for Outstanding Project, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, Air Force Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, and 3M Faculty Award, among others.