A brassboard or brass board is an experimental or demonstration test model, intended for field testing outside the

laboratory A laboratory (; ; colloquially lab) is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific or technological research, experiments, and measurement may be performed. Laboratory services are provided in a variety of settings: physicia ...

environment. A brassboard follows an earlier prototyping stage called a

breadboard 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 ...

. A brassboard contains both the functionality and approximate physical configuration of the final operational product. Unlike breadboards, brassboards typically recreate geometric and dimensional constraints of the final system which are critical to its performance, as is the case in

radio frequency Radio frequency (RF) is the oscillation rate of an alternating electric current or voltage or of a magnetic, electric or electromagnetic field or mechanical system in the frequency range from around to around . This is roughly between the upp ...

systems. While representative of the physical layout of the production-grade product, a brassboard will not necessarily incorporate all final details, nor represent the physical size and quality level of the final deliverable product. Exact definition of a brassboard depends on the industry and has changed with time. A 1992 guide book on proposal preparation defined a brassboard ''or'' a breadboard as "a laboratory or shop working model that may or may not look like the final product or system, but that will operate in the same way as the final system". The definition of a breadboard was further narrowed to purely electronic systems, while a brassboard was treated as "a similar arrangement for hydraulic, pneumatic or mechanically interconnected components".Stewart and Stewart, p. 46. In modern

system-on-a-chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...

prototyping, brassboard is defined as a second prototyping stage that follows

engineering validation board Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more speciali ...

s (EVB) and precedes wingboards and final pre-production samples. In a single example the board area decreases four times with each of these steps, so the brassboard is one fourth as large as an EVB, four times larger than the wingboard and around sixteen times larger than a production device. Most systems in the vast array of industries cannot be characterized so specifically.

Footnotes

References

Hal Mooz Harold (Hal) Mooz (born ca. 1932) is an American systems engineer, business consultant and founder and CEO of The Center for Systems Management, Inc., awarded the INCOSE Pioneer Award in 2001. Biography Mooz received his ME in Mechanical Engine ...

Kevin Forsberg Kevin John Forsberg (born 1934) is an American engineer, business consultant, and with Harold Mooz co-founder and executive director of The Center for Systems Management,

, Howard Cotterman (2003).
Communicating project management: the integrated vocabulary of project management and systems engineering
'. John Wiley and Sons. . * Rodney D. Stewart, Ann L. Stewart (1992).
Proposal preparation
'. Wiley-IEEE. . Electronics substrates Electronic design Tests {{science-stub