ELEC 432
Goals
Your ELEC 432 Senior Design project is supposed to be a professional,
finished product,
so building it on a 241 breadboard is not an option.
Actually, there are other problems with the 241 breadboard beside its
unsuitable appearance.
Many of you had trouble getting your 241/242 circuits to do what you wanted them to
with signals of only a few kilohertz.
At several hundred megahertz, your circuit would probably do everything
but
what you wanted it to.
Another problem is that most of the interesting, modern, high-performance
integrated circuits aren't even available in dual inline packages,
they only come in surface mount packages.
This means that
we need to build our circuits on printed circuit boards for that
tidy, professional look, and that most of the components we use will
be surface mount devices (SMDs).
We will
address
many of the problems of prototyping and fabricating circuits with SMDs
over the course of
Exercises 2, 4, and 7.
We'll start this week with the easy part: reliably soldering those tiny little
components onto the circuit board.
At least it's easy once you've done it a few times. So this week we'll practice
doing that using a board that's already been laid out and fabricated.