Digital fabricator

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A digital fabricator (commonly shortened to fabber) is a small, self-contained factory that can make objects described by digital data. Fabbers make three-dimensional, solid objects that can be used as models, as prototypes, or as delivered products. They are widely used by manufacturers for these purposes. Fabbers use a wide range of techniques to make products from a wide range of materials. The quality of these materials and the precision of fabrication can be a major constraint on functional applications.[1]

Proposed nanofactories would be fabbers that employ arrays of nanoscale machines to assemble macroscopic products from molecular feedstocks. This level of control would enable production of high-performance materials that form structures of nearly perfect precision.

The term "fabber" is also used to refer to hypothetical devices that would be capable of Universal Fabrication. Given a sufficiently detailed set of plans, power and the correct raw feedstocks, a universal fabber could produce any manufacturable item, including a copy of itself. No proposed machine would be universal in the common sense of the word, since not all physical structures can be manufactured.