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BREADBOARDING

by Stuart Ball

Start ý Grounding ý Placing Copper Strips ý Power Wiring and Supply Bypassing ý Lead Wiring ý Test Points ý Surface-Mount Parts ý Other Tips ý Putting It All Together ý Other Techniques ý Sources and PDF

Sometimes the best way to test a new circuit is to prototype it. If you are planning to build only one, the prototype may be the only one you ever put together. Unfortunately, prototyping is slowly dying out in the electronics industry. Modern CAD tools let you produce a circuit board layout in a few hours. And, rapid prototype circuit board shops can get you boards faster than you can get the parts to populate them. Compared to the time and labor involved in hand-wiring a prototype, making a circuit board is inexpensive for most companies in the electronics business.

However, the electronics experimenter has a different economic scale. Paying $600 or more for tools for something you will build only one of is a difficult decision to justify.

In this article, I will look at a way to produce one-of-a-kind prototypes without resorting to printed circuit boards. This method is suitable for high-speed logic and microprocessor circuits and is best suited for building digital circuits. These techniques can also be applied to analog or RF designs.

The basic prototyping material is perfboard, such as that sold at Radio Shack. This material has holes on 0.1ý (2.54-mm) centers and is available in several sizes. The holes match the pin spacing on DIP ICs and many other components.

You can get perfboard with plated-through pads on every hole, but I prefer the type without pads. Itýs cheaper and, as youýll see, more flexible when using the techniques Iým going to tell you about.

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