Georgia Tech Team 100x Faster Nanoscale 3D Printing With Light Patterns

What they actually built

Nanoscale 3D printing has always been slow. The machines that can print features smaller than a human hair typically work point by point, which makes producing anything useful take days or weeks. A team at Georgia Tech has now changed that equation with a new light patterning method that prints roughly 100 times faster than their previous setup while keeping the same fine resolution.

The trick is in how they control light. Their system uses a binary mask that can only turn pixels on or off. Most engineers would assume that limits you to two brightness levels. The Georgia Tech group realized they could encode many intensity levels by arranging tiny on-off patterns smaller than the diffraction limit. Instead of fighting diffraction, they used it. The result is a way to shape light across an entire printing area at once, with each spot getting exactly the dose it needs.

Why speed and detail both matter

Nanoscale structures are not just laboratory curiosities. They show up in advanced computing, micro-optics, biomedical devices, and fusion energy research. But none of those applications scale if each part takes months to fabricate. The Georgia Tech team says their approach achieves a voxel generation rate of 1.7 billion per second and a volumetric printing rate of 217 cubic millimeters per hour. They printed nanowires as thin as 55 nanometers and nanoporous structures with pores below one micron.

The work, led by associate professor Sourabh Saha and postdoctoral researcher Harnjoo Kim, appears in Nature Communications. Saha put it plainly: real-world parts have strict size limits, and printing speed directly affects whether a part is affordable. You need both accuracy and throughput, not one or the other.

From lab to startup

The technology has already left the lab. Kim co-founded Stellar Scale Nano Foundation with Saha and undergraduate Harry Watkins. The startup, incubated at Georgia Tech, has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding. Their plan is to move the technique from research-grade optics into scalable manufacturing tools for advanced computing, optics, and fusion energy applications.

What stands out about this story is that it did not solve the speed-versus-fidelity tradeoff by picking one over the other. It found a way around the constraint entirely. If the startup delivers on the commercial version, nanoscale additive manufacturing could go from niche lab work to production-ready within a few years.