One can 3D print with conductive filament, and therefore plausibly create passive components like resistors. But what about active components, which typically require semiconductors? Researchers at…
They don’t talk that much about current in particular; figure 5 only shows the resistance in the regulated output path as a function of the voltage on the control path, which isn’t enough to actually say whether there’s specifically current amplification. (Also, the gain would be negative; does that matter?) But they do discuss the fact that the output channel is much wider, which strongly suggests it’s able to pass more current (since they mention the resistivity drops as the cross-sectional area of the trace increases). The wider trace is one that wouldn’t have the fuse behavior on its own, because the resistivity is too low for it to heat up enough to trigger that at the voltages they’re using, but the close proximity of the very thin fusing wire of the control signal is enough to cause a nonlinear resistivity change in the output path as well. I think that means they’re using a single voltage for both kinds of path, and that the control current is thus lower than the output current because the resistance on the control path is higher, but I’m not certain. I am not an electrical engineer, just an enthusiastic amateur.
My quick and dirty math based on some captions of the figures from the paper suggest it’s unlikely they’re getting amplification for now, because it seems like the even the “low” resistance state is quite resistive. But I still suspect it can be done, and they do characterize their structures as “active” - thanks!
I think so? It’s section 3.2 of the paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17452759.2024.2404157#d1e604
They don’t talk that much about current in particular; figure 5 only shows the resistance in the regulated output path as a function of the voltage on the control path, which isn’t enough to actually say whether there’s specifically current amplification. (Also, the gain would be negative; does that matter?) But they do discuss the fact that the output channel is much wider, which strongly suggests it’s able to pass more current (since they mention the resistivity drops as the cross-sectional area of the trace increases). The wider trace is one that wouldn’t have the fuse behavior on its own, because the resistivity is too low for it to heat up enough to trigger that at the voltages they’re using, but the close proximity of the very thin fusing wire of the control signal is enough to cause a nonlinear resistivity change in the output path as well. I think that means they’re using a single voltage for both kinds of path, and that the control current is thus lower than the output current because the resistance on the control path is higher, but I’m not certain. I am not an electrical engineer, just an enthusiastic amateur.
My quick and dirty math based on some captions of the figures from the paper suggest it’s unlikely they’re getting amplification for now, because it seems like the even the “low” resistance state is quite resistive. But I still suspect it can be done, and they do characterize their structures as “active” - thanks!