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
BSAC Co-Director Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng is an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. His research focuses on developing additive manufacturing/3D printing techniques for materials and structures with controlled topologies and encoded properties. His current interests are in developing new additive fabrication techniques, multi-material synthesis, structure property relationships and leveraging novel artificial intelligence to create intelligent materials and systems for structural, robotics, electronics, energy, and healthcare. His group is a global pioneer in developing 3D printing technologies and materials for electronic and multi-functional materials, including dielectrics, conductive, piezoelectric and structural materials. These capabilities are being used in the next generation of sensors, transducers, electronics and robotics.
Prior to joining BSAC, Professor Zheng was an Associate Professor at UCLA, Virginia Tech, and a mechanical engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, MA.