Top Voices Business Insight Journal Interview with Melbs LeMieux, Co-Founder and President of Electroninks Incorporated

May 14, 2026

Insights from Melbs LeMieux on advanced materials, additive manufacturing, and the future of microelectronics.

Welcome to Business Insight Journal, Melbs. We’re delighted to have you. Please can you walk us through your professional journey and what led you to co-found Electroninks Incorporated?

At the highest level, this is an opportunity to build something that could advance microelectronics, while adding a positive economic impact and high-value jobs in an important technology sector. Specifically for me, my education and professional training in advance materials, thin films and microelectronics, combined with an entrepreneurial drive led me to start my first company, which was eventually sold to a large a chemicals company here in the US. Electroninks is my second company. In 2014, I met Brett Walker, my co-founder and really the driver of the initial chemistry, and we had a mutual vision on how to commercialize that chemistry into formulations that could be produced and deposited in mass-production settings. It’s extremely difficult to start companies to begin with, and especially challenging with new materials. We built a solid team, travelled the globe nonstop for 5+ years teaching customers about MOD technology, with adoption now taking hold.

Traditional metallization processes have been widely used for years. What are the key limitations of these legacy approaches?

As performance demands increase (particularly in advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration) these methods become limiting. They struggle to enable the types of structures now required, such as highly conformal sidewalls, fine-pitch high-density interconnects, low-temperature processing on sensitive substrates, and complex 3D geometries. In many cases, the process itself dictates the design, rather than enabling new architectures.

Breaking through current performance bottlenecks increasingly requires new build approaches that decouple design from these legacy constraints—enabling more flexible, additive, and geometry-driven fabrication. Companies like Electroninks have framed this shift clearly in applications such as seed-layer formation, EMI shielding, and next-generation packaging.

Additive ink-based methods are gaining attention. How do they simplify manufacturing workflows and reduce costs?

Additive, ink-based metallization simplifies manufacturing by shifting from subtractive processes to selective deposition—placing material only where it’s needed. This eliminates multiple steps such as vacuum deposition, lithography, etching, and extensive wet processing, reducing complexity, defect risk, and cycle time. It also lowers costs by minimizing material waste, energy use, and reliance on capital-intensive equipment. More importantly, it decouples manufacturing from legacy constraints, enabling lower-temperature processing, broader substrate compatibility, and scalable panel-level approaches. Ultimately, the advantage is foundational —simplifying the process, tooling footprint and CAPEX, while enabling more design-driven, flexible production.

As semiconductor devices become more advanced, how important is conformal metallization and EMI shielding in modern packaging?

It is becoming critical. As packages get denser and components sit closer together, EMI becomes a system-level design issue, not an afterthought. Conformal metallization matters because modern packages are three-dimensional, compact, and performance-sensitive. If you cannot coat complex surfaces uniformly, you end up creating reliability and performance bottlenecks. Package-level shielding is increasingly important in compact electronics, and Electroninks has specifically highlighted that its MOD deposition process can achieve strong sidewall coverage in geometries that traditional methods struggle to handle.

How is System in Package and AI-driven compute influencing the need for new materials and processes?

System-in-Package and AI-driven compute are accelerating the need for new materials and processes by fundamentally increasing integration density, power, and complexity. As multiple dies, memory, and heterogeneous components are tightly integrated, traditional metallization approaches struggle to meet requirements for fine-feature interconnects, thermal management, and signal integrity. AI workloads further intensify these demands, pushing for higher current densities and faster data movement on increasingly complex geometries. This is where additive, ink-based approaches—such as those developed by Electroninks—become especially relevant, enabling direct patterning of high-performance metals at lower temperatures and across a wider range of substrates. Ultimately, these trends are driving a shift toward more flexible, design-driven manufacturing that better aligns with the needs of next-generation packaging.

Sustainability is becoming a priority in manufacturing. How do additive approaches support decarbonization goals?

Additive approaches support decarbonization at a system level by fundamentally reducing the material, energy, and infrastructure intensity of manufacturing. For OEMs and hyperscalers, this translates directly into lower embodied carbon, reduced water and chemical usage, and more efficient, scalable production aligned with sustainability targets. By eliminating multiple process steps and enabling lower-temperature, less capital-intensive workflows, additive methods also support more localized and flexible manufacturing—reducing supply chain emissions and improving resilience. Approaches like those from Electroninks further align with this shift by enabling high-performance metallization with fewer inputs and less process overhead. Ultimately, additive manufacturing offers a pathway to meet both performance and ESG goals without the traditional trade-offs.

What impact does reduced material waste and energy usage have on large-scale production environments?

Reduced material waste and energy usage have a compounding impact at scale, improving both economics and sustainability across large production environments. For OEMs and hyperscalers, this means lower operating costs, reduced embodied carbon, and more efficient, resilient supply chains aligned with ESG targets. For engineering directors, it translates into simpler process flows, fewer failure points, and more predictable yield and throughput—making it easier to scale advanced designs without adding complexity. On the factory floor, fewer steps, less chemical handling, and reduced process overhead can improve uptime, safety, and overall workflow efficiency. Approaches such as those from Electroninks reinforce this shift by enabling more selective, streamlined metallization. Ultimately, these efficiencies benefit every layer of the organization, scaling from day-to-day operations to long-term strategic advantage.

As leaders, we have to look beyond simply replacing legacy processes and instead embrace solutions, which are often new and risky, that fundamentally simplify manufacturing, improve sustainability, and unlock performance and scale.

Flexible electronics and wearables are growing rapidly. How are new materials enabling innovation in these categories?

Flexible electronics and wearables are still an early, rapidly evolving market, and new materials are playing a central role in shaping what products are even possible to build. From a product development perspective, materials that enable low-temperature processing, mechanical flexibility, and direct patterning on non-traditional substrates allow teams to move beyond rigid form factors and explore new device architectures. This reduces the gap between concept and manufacturable design, enabling faster iteration and more integrated, conformal products.

For engineering teams, these materials open up new design spaces—such as stretchable interconnects, printed sensors, and embedded functionality—without requiring entirely new manufacturing infrastructure. Approaches like those from Electroninks further support this by enabling conductive features to be printed directly onto/into flexible substrates/fabrics, simplifying prototyping and early production. Ultimately, innovation in this category is less about incremental improvements and more about expanding the design envelope, allowing product teams to define new use cases rather than just optimize existing ones.

On a personal note, what strategy helps you stay effective while leading innovation in a highly technical industry?

I’ve found that staying effective in a highly technical, fast-moving space comes down to consistently aligning innovation with outcomes—both technical and economic. It’s easy for teams to get pulled into complexity, so I focus on maintaining succinctness around what actually drives step-function improvements in performance, and ultimately customer adoption. That means spending time at multiple levels: understanding enough of the technical detail to ask the right questions, while also keeping a clear line of sight to how those decisions translate into growth, adoption, and long-term value creation.

Equally important is building a team and environment that can move quickly while staying grounded. At Electroninks, that means actively listening to the teams closest to the technology and the process—because they often see opportunities and risks before they surface elsewhere. My role is to balance that input with external signals, ensuring we’re driving toward near-term customer adoption while also investing in the capabilities that create long-term value. In an emerging space, there isn’t a fixed playbook, so staying effective comes down to aligning strong internal insight with market realities and focusing execution on the highest-impact opportunities.

Finally, what advice would you give to leaders exploring advanced manufacturing solutions, and any closing thoughts you would like to share with our readers? 

For leaders exploring advanced manufacturing solutions, the most important starting point is to anchor every decision in a clear understanding of where meaningful value is created—whether that’s performance, cost, scalability, or time to market. It’s easy to get drawn to novel technologies, but the real advantage comes from identifying where a new approach removes a fundamental bottleneck rather than incrementally improving an existing process. That requires an entrepreneurial mindset—being willing to challenge assumptions, move early on promising ideas, and accept a degree of calculated risk to capture outsized upside.

More broadly, we’re at a point where manufacturing innovation is increasingly tied to system-level outcomes—performance, efficiency, and sustainability are no longer independent variables. Approaches like those being advanced by Electroninks reflect a broader shift toward more flexible, design-driven manufacturing that aligns better with where advanced packaging and electronics are heading.

Ultimately, the leaders who will benefit most from this transition are those who stay focused on outcomes, remain open to fundamentally different approaches, and are willing to invest early in capabilities that can define the next generation of products.

Melbs LeMieux is the co-founder and president of Electroninks, a global leader in developing and commercializing advanced electronic materials. The company’s core products are focused on a portfolio of metal-complex conductive inks, comprised of Ag, Cu, Ni, Pd, Pt, and other alloys, for additive manufacturing and advanced semiconductor packaging. Their metallization technology has become critical materials for commercial and defense supply chains. With nearly two decades of experience at the intersection of materials science, electronics, and manufacturing, he is widely recognized for advancing next-generation metallization technologies that enable more efficient, scalable, and sustainable production processes.

LeMieux holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Iowa State University and completed postdoctoral research in Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. His career has focused on translating deep materials innovation into real-world manufacturing solutions.

At Electroninks HQ headquarters in Austin TX, LeMieux leads the company’s strategic vision, driving the development and commercialization of proprietary metal-organic decomposition (MOD) inks that are reshaping how conductive materials are deposited across industries ranging from consumer electronics to automotive, medical devices, and aero/defense. Ultimately, his work emphasizes listening to customer problems from design, implementation and market strategy perspective, and responding with solutions from Electroninks technology and talented team.

A frequent industry speaker and thought leader, LeMieux is an active voice in the evolution of advanced packaging and additive manufacturing. He is particularly focused on how advanced materials can address needs in emerging technologies such as AI-driven compute and related 3D and chiplet architectures driving these end-uses for the hyperscalers, and ultimate their customers.