Rewriting Metallization, One Ink at a Time

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Additive manufacturing has long promised to reshape how electronics are built, but that promise has remained just out of reach for many in the PCB industry who are limited by materials, performance trade-offs, and real-world manufacturability. Electroninks aims to change that equation by rethinking metallization at the chemical level by developing metal-complex inks that challenge established approaches and open new possibilities for advanced packaging, interconnects, and beyond. Co-founder and president Melbs LeMieux discusses the evolution of the technology, the realities of bringing new materials to market, and where additive manufacturing may finally begin to deliver on its potential.

Marcy LaRont: Melbs, please tell us a little bit about yourself and how Electroninks got started.

Melbs LeMieux: I grew up in Michigan and later earned my PhD in Materials Science from Iowa State, followed by a postdoc in chemical engineering at Stanford. Around 2013, I connected with our co-founder and CEO, Brett Walker. He was bringing some really strong chemistry to the table, and I had already spent time scaling metallization technologies commercially, so there was a natural fit.

From there, the idea behind Electroninks really took shape. We saw an opportunity to develop materials that could be deposited in a much more agile, additive way, especially for semiconductor metallization, advanced packaging, substrates, and PCBs. That combination of chemistry and manufacturability became the foundation for the company.

LaRont: Let’s talk about your product, which is described as “particle-free metal complex inks.” Is that a fundamental shift from nanoparticle-based systems? Please explain its significance.

LeMieux: “Particle-free” is really more of a marketing term. Technically, these are metal complex conductive inks. With nanoparticle inks, the particles have to fuse together, and to keep them stable in solution, you need organic components to prevent agglomeration. The challenge is those organics remain in the printed film, and unless you cure at high temperatures, they can limit performance and reliability.

What we’ve done is take precursor chemistries—similar to what’s used in ALD (atomic layer deposition) or CVD (chemical vapor deposition)—and adapt them into a printable ink. That allows you to metallize surfaces without vacuum processing or high-temperature deposition.

The key advantage is that these metal complex inks don’t rely on those organic stabilizers, so the resulting film behaves much more like a pure metal layer, similar to what you’d see with electroless deposition or PVD (physical vapor deposition) in semiconductor backend processes.

To continue reading this article, which appeared in the May 2026 I-Connect007 Magazine, click here.