The Resolution-Throughput Conflict In Material Extrusion Additive Manufacturing

Material extrusion additive manufacturing enables a wide range of technologies, from microscale functional devices to meter-scale structural components, yet its broader adoption as a manufacturing platform and, increasingly, as a materials discovery tool remains constrained by a persistent coupling between resolution and throughput. Across materials, architectures, and length scales, improvements in geometric resolution are systematically accompanied by disproportionate reductions in deposition rate and printable volume. Consequently, progress has largely relied on optimizing isolated subsystems, yielding only incremental improvements or introducing constraints elsewhere in the system. This perspective argues that overcoming the resolution-throughput tradeoff requires a unified, system-level approach that explicitly accounts for the coupled interactions among materials physics, flow dynamics, and machine architecture. Strategies are organized into three mechanistic domains according to how they intervene in deposition: software and control, deposition hardware and architecture, and hybrid processes. Examined within this structure, existing and emerging approaches reveal shared limitations, unrealized complementarities, and fundamental incompatibilities. Together, these insights outline pathways toward material extrusion systems in which resolution and throughput can be adjusted with greater independence, enabling reliable manufacturing across diverse materials, scales, and application domains.