15.04.2009

Schmartboard Makes Prototyping of Surface Mount Devices Easy

Has prototyping your electronic designs with a QFP, SOP, BGA, PLCC and other surface mount devices always been an expensive and cumbersome process, leading to slower time to market for your products?

SchmartBoard, a US company and available through GLYN High-Tech Distribution, has developed PCBs which make prototyping of surface mount devices quite easy.  SchmartBoard is the easiest electronic circuit prototyping system on the market.

Every company that designs a product involving electronics must first create a functional prototype. Hardware design engineers today either use prototype boards to test a circuit or they go straight to a custom printed circuit board (PCB) for the initial prototype. If they go straight to a custom PCB, the cost can be very high. Every time a change is made, they have to remake the custom PCB, which is both expensive and time consuming. A prototyping board on the other hand, can save the engineer valuable time and money by allowing changes to be made quickly and inexpensively, but if they do use a prototyping board they have had limitations. Prototyping boards have existed for a long time, but as surface mount components have become smaller and smaller, these boards have not kept up with the technology and have not remained a practical tool for many applications. SchmartBoardTM makes prototype boards useful again because they work with today’s miniaturized components. Similar issues exist for universities that teach electronic engineering and for electronic hobbyists. The SchmartBoardTM system is the long-awaited answer to these issues.

Two problems impede people’s ability to hand solder surface mount components. First, placing and holding the components in place correctly on the pad surface, and second, hand soldering in such small confined areas without creating short circuits.

SchmartBoard/ez’s patent pending technology solves these issues in the following way. Unlike all other circuit boards, the solder mask is higher than the pads, not lower. What this does is create canals. The walls of the canal are made by the solder mask, and the floor of the canal is the pad surface. The legs of the IC fit into this canal, thus allowing easy hand placement of the chip legs onto the pads.

To solder the IC, one uses a fine tip soldering iron, but no additional solder is required. Using the soldering iron, one heats up the existing solder on the pads in each of the canals and pushes the soldering iron from the lateral end of the canal to the medial end until the iron touches the chip’s leg. The solder stays in the canal, thus assuring that no shorts are created. This is repeated for each canal that has a leg to be soldered. In the case of Ball Grid Arrays Integrated Circuits, the BGA is easily placed in the same manner as the ICs but a heat gun is used to heat up the existing solder on the pads instead of a soldering iron.

SchmartBoard/ezTM is so simple that a ten year old can pick up soldering iron for the first time, and hand-solder a .4mm IC, more quickly and flawlessly than the vast majority of engineer who aren’t using SchmartBoard/ezTM. Hand soldering surface mount components is now accessible to virtually anyone.

Designs can also be easily debugged and recycled by using a modular approach with SchmartBoard/ezTM  where surface mount ICs can be soldered onto individual SchmartBoard/ezTM  PCBs for SOP, QFP, PLCC, BGA and Through Hole ICs and then interconnected using SchmartBridgeTM connectors. Developing prototypes using the SchmartBoard system becomes similar to using Lego blocks where complicated prototypes can be built and tested much easier by interconnecting fully tested and debugged SchmartBoard modules.

For more details about SchmartBoard products, please send us an email at sales@glyn.com.au