The goal of this project is to provide students and designers with improved access to new layered manufacturing processes including MicroElectro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and Shape Deposition Manufacturing (SDM) technologies. Together, these technologies can facilitate the design of new classes of products that would be difficult, if not impossible, to build with currently available manufacturing techniques. These processes are capable of generating dense, multi-material parts with complex shapes; the size of device features may range over six orders of magnitude; and the range of materials includes metals, plastics and ceramics. This spectrum of integrated additive and subtractive fabrication processes will be linked by SDM And MEMS Unified Exchange Language (SAMUEL) service. The SAMUEL service will provide a common interface and rapid access to two manufacturing processes: SDM and MEMS. Creating the SAMUEL service will demonstrate that designers who are unfamiliar with details of the manufacturing processes can rapidly create physical artifacts and explore new design ideas. Through a standard interface, designers will able to access the SDM and MEMS manufacturing sites and quickly incorporate manufacturing process constraints into their design system. The manufacturing constraints can be expressed as rules for invocation at the design level.
