Is There a Moore's Law for 3D Printing?

Three-dimensional (3D) printing (3DP) has received significant attention for its promise of reinventing the way products are manufactured. At times, there have been differences in the expectations of the public of what the technology would be able to do as compared with what the technology was capable of at a certain point in time. Although experts often feel that future improvements will overcome this, there is usually not a sense of how rapidly these future improvements will occur. The semiconductor industry and others have effectively addressed this problem by tracking how quickly the technology improves over time (i.e., Moore's law). This article looks at industrial stereolithography (SLA) 3DP and measures the technological improvement rate empirically at 37.6% per year and compares it with an estimate based on analysis of the patents that have been issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in SLA 3DP. This approach has been shown to give reliable estimates and in this SLA 3D case gives a very close estimate of 46.8% per year. We then find representative sets of patents and use the estimating technique to calculate the expected technological improvement rate for four other main types of 3DP: inkjet-powder-based 3DP (35.0%), metal selective laser sintering (SLS) (33.3%), fused filament fabrication (FFF) (16.7%), nonmetal SLS (21.1%), and for the 3DP domain as a whole (29.4%). Further analysis on the patent sets provides top assignees and the most central patents for each of the 3DP domains. Overall, the improvement rates found support the idea that 3DP is rapidly improving and, therefore, potentially capable of fulfilling its promise but also that some 3DP approaches (particularly FFF and nonmetal SLS) are likely improving at a lower rate.