[bilsbie]

How come we don’t make chips with really small 3d printers?

[dehrmann]

Sibling has a good comment about silicon. Another reason you're printing something like 100B transistors. So that's at least 100B raster steps. It would just take too long.

[tbrownaw]

The closest thing there is is e-beam lithography. It isn't really practical.

[Melatonic]

Isnt that smaller? I was under the impression e-beam is one of the (possible) next generation chip technologies.

Getting it to scale is the issue

[wmf]

AFAIK you can't really print crystalline silicon so they have to start with a wafer and dope/etch into it to form transistors.