Additive manufacturing of devices from assemblies of discretized component voxel elements

A method for fabricating a device, the method comprising:

• fabricating an assembly of component voxels, each component voxel having a corresponding functionality,
• wherein fabricating each component voxel of the assembly comprises:
• forming a base layer and an outer layer by an additive manufacturing process, an interior space of the component voxel being defined in a volume adjacent to the base layer and the outer layer;
• and
• forming a component structure associated with the functionality of the component voxel, comprising one or more of (i) disposing the component structure in the interior space of the component voxel and (ii) by the additive manufacturing process, embedding the component structure in the base layer.

A method for designing an apparatus to be fabricated by additive manufacturing, the method comprising:

• by one or more processors, partitioning a specified geometry of the apparatus into a geometric mesh including an assembly of mesh units each having a corresponding size and position;
• defining, by the one or more processors, an arrangement of component voxels based on the geometric mesh and based on a specified functionality of the apparatus, each component voxel corresponding to one or more mesh units of the assembly, the defining comprising:
• defining a size and position of each component voxel in the specified geometry of the apparatus;
• and
• assigning a component structure to each component voxel, wherein each component structure is associated with a functionality exhibited by the corresponding component voxel;
• and
• by the one or more processors, generating machine-readable instructions for manufacturing of the arrangement of component voxels.