Print your own circuit boards.

Kite is building a desktop 3D printer for complete multilayer circuit boards. Ceramic, silver traces and embedded components, printed together and fired into one solid board.

For makers, businesses, schools and labs. Designed to turn weeks of waiting into about a day.

Get updates How it works

Heartbeat / 01 · 5 V 555 LED blinker. Electrical design checked; printed materials unqualified. Accelerated process; layer spacing and conductor thickness enlarged. Circuit schematic ↗

Supported by

Innovation Hub
I-Corps

Outsourcing boards means waiting.

Problem illustration: an outsourced PCB crosses the Pacific while its designer waits to test it — An example of the overseas supply chain Kite is working to replace. Routes and transport vary.

Designing a board can take an afternoon. Outsourcing it means sending the files to a fab house, then waiting days or weeks while it is etched, plated and shipped. Every mistake restarts the wait, and every design has to leave the building.

Kite is building a printer that makes the board on your desk. It prints ceramic and silver together, then fires them into one solid circuit board. Build, test and revise in-house.

Outsourcing vs. printing in-house
Measure	PCB fab house
Turnaround	Days to weeks, plus shipping	About a day target
Minimum order	A batch of boards	One board
Cost per revision	A batch order plus shipping	The materials for one board
Where it’s made	A fab, often overseas	Your desk, lab or shop
Design files	Sent to the fab	Stay with you

Where Kite fits.

Today you can wait on a fab, settle for printed ink, or buy an industrial machine.

PCB fab houses

Cheap per board at volume, but every revision means days to weeks of waiting and shipping.

Desktop ink printers

Print silver ink onto FR-4 and cure it. Cured ink conducts much worse than solid metal, which limits what the boards can do.

Industrial electronics printers

Capable multilayer machines, at six-figure prices that most labs and small companies can’t justify.

Designed to fire silver paste inside the ceramic, so the traces sinter into solid metal, at a price a lab or small company can justify.

How it works

The technology

01
Print
Ceramic paste builds each layer of the board. Silver paste lays down the traces and fills the vias that connect the layers.
Two pastes, one print
02
Fire
The printed board is fired at 850–900 °C. Ceramic and silver fuse into one solid board.
Low-temperature co-fired ceramic
03
Finish
Solder the chips and connectors onto the printed pads, then power the board up.
Standard IPC-7351 footprints

Resistors, capacitors and inductors, printed inside the board.

Most of the parts on a typical board are passives. Kite can print them into the layers along with the wiring, so there are fewer parts left to place and solder.

Printed passives start at about ±10–20% before trimming, so we start with the parts that don’t need tight tolerances.

ResistorA stripe of resistive paste. Length and width set the value.

CapacitorTwo silver plates around a dielectric layer. Plate area and spacing set the value.

InductorA planar coil of the same silver used for the traces.

For anyone who builds electronics.

Makers at home

Print a board the same day you design it, with no order, no shipping and no minimum.

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Startups and businesses

Turn board revisions around in-house instead of waiting on a fab for every change.

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Schools and labs

Let students and researchers print the boards they design, on site.

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Sensitive designs

Defense, aerospace and unreleased products never leave your building.

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Ceramic also handles heat and high frequencies better than FR-4, which matters for RF, aerospace and biomedical electronics.

What’s happening now

All updates

Status

Building: Our own syringe extruder. The first printed part is assembled and the largest part is printing.
Next: A first test pattern with a stand-in paste, targeted for early October. Then silver printed onto a printed glass board and fired in the kiln.
Then: A fired 555-timer LED blinker: our first working circuit.
Looking for: A materials scientist who knows paste rheology and co-firing, and engineering interns.

Updated September 25, 2026

Sep 25, 2026Hardware
First extruder part printed and assembled
The first PETG part of our syringe extruder is printed and assembled, and a new gear now locks to the lead screw. The largest part is printing now; the third follows.
Sep 24, 2026Hardware
Extruder fitted to the measured syringe
We measured the syringe, bracket, rail and lead-screw hardware with calipers and redesigned the extruder around them: three printed parts on the printer’s stock bracket and motor, checked in simulation for strength and for an assembly order where nothing collides.
Sep 20, 2026Materials
Silver paste delivered to the testbed
The Dycotec silver paste, its thinner and glass-filled filament for printed test boards arrived at the testbed.