A breadboard, solderless breadboard, or protoboard is a construction base used to build semi-permanent prototypes of electronic circuits. Unlike a perfboard or stripboard, breadboards do not require soldering or destruction of tracks and are hence reusable. For this reason, breadboards are also popular with students and in technological education. A variety of electronic systems may be prototyped by using breadboards, from small analog and digital circuits to complete central processing units (CPUs). Compared to more permanent circuit connection methods, modern breadboards have high parasitic capacitance, relatively high resistance, and less reliable connections, which are subject to jostle and physical degradation. Signaling is limited to about 10 MHz, and not everything works properly even well below that frequency. In the early days of radio, amateurs nailed bare copper wires or terminal strips to a wooden board (often literally a bread cutting board) and soldered electronic components to them. Sometimes a paper schematic diagram was first glued to the board as a guide to placing terminals, then components and wires were installed over their symbols on the schematic. Using thumbtacks or small nails as mounting posts was also common. Breadboards have evolved over time, with the term now being used for all kinds of prototype electronic devices. For example, US Patent 3,145,483, was filed in 1961 and describes a wooden plate breadboard with mounted springs and other facilities. US Patent 3,496,419, was filed in 1967 and refers to a particular printed circuit board layout as a Printed Circuit Breadboard. Both examples refer to and describe other types of breadboards as prior art. In 1960, Orville Thompson of DeVry Technical Institute patented a solderless breadboard connecting rows of holes together with spring metal. In 1971, Ronald Portugal of E&L Instruments patented a similar concept with holes in spacings, the same as DIP IC packages, which became the basis of the modern solderless breadboard that is commonly used today.

About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related concepts (14)
Through-hole technology
In electronics, through-hole technology (also spelled "thru-hole") is a manufacturing scheme in which leads on the components are inserted through holes drilled in printed circuit boards (PCB) and soldered to pads on the opposite side, either by manual assembly (hand placement) or by the use of automated insertion mount machines. Through-hole technology almost completely replaced earlier electronics assembly techniques such as point-to-point construction.
Electronic component
An electronic component is any basic discrete electronic device or physical entity part of an electronic system used to affect electrons or their associated fields. Electronic components are mostly industrial products, available in a singular form and are not to be confused with electrical elements, which are conceptual abstractions representing idealized electronic components and elements. Electronic components have a number of electrical terminals or leads.
Point-to-point construction
In electronics, point-to-point construction is a non-automated technique for constructing circuits which was widely used before the use of printed circuit boards (PCBs) and automated assembly gradually became widespread following their introduction in the 1950s. Circuits using thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) were relatively large, relatively simple (the number of large, hot, expensive devices which needed replacing was minimised), and used large sockets, all of which made the PCB less obviously advantageous than with later complex semiconductor circuits.
Show more

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.