You might have heard about Schmartboard, a company that produces circuit boards that facilitate prototyping with surface-mount technology (SMT) components, particularly integrated circuits. According to Neal Greenberg, Schmartboard’s vice president of sales and marketing, some people have cut small-outline IC (SOIC) prototype boards in half to use with SMT connectors and LCDs.

No more board cutting needed. Schmartboard has a new family of prototype boards made specifically for SMT connectors from companies such as Hirose, Molex, Samtec and Tyco that have a "pitch," or pin-to-pin space, of 0.4, 0.5, 0.8, 1.0, or 1.27 mm. The multilayer boards use the Schmartboard EZ technology that provides a small "trough" or "canal" that a connector's SMT pins drop into. The trough properly aligns the pins on the board, simplifies soldering, and reduces or eliminates solder bridges between contact pins. And you don't add any solder--it's already in the trough, ready for a small soldering-iron tip. Each connector pin connects to one of a series of large plated-through holes created in an offset pattern. People who use these boards solder individual wires or pins in these holes as needed for their prototypes.

The image above shows the 0.4-mm-pitch connector board on the left and the 1.27-mm-pitch board on the right. Note the 14-pin DIP and 28-pin SMT ICs for comparison.

I have used Schmartboard products and they work well. In addition to the SMT-connector boards, the company sells many other types of breadboard or prototype PCBs. Individual SMT-connector boards sell for $US 9.99 and a 10-pack of boards sells for $US $80. For more information, visit: www.schmartboard.com/index.asp?page=products_connectors.

--Jon Titus