Stripboard
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Stripboard is the generic name for a widely used type of
electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...
prototyping A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and software programming. A prototype is generally used to ...
material for
circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a laminated sandwich struc ...
s characterized by a pre-formed regular (rectangular) grid of holes, with wide parallel strips of copper cladding running in one direction all the way across one side of on an insulating bonded paper board. It is commonly also known by the name of the original product Veroboard, which is a trademark, in the UK, of British company
Vero Technologies Ltd Vero Technologies Ltd is a UK company located at Hedge End, Hampshire, UK and formed in 2003 after the APW Electronics Group went into administration. The APW intellectual property was sold off to various companies around the world with the protot ...
and Canadian company Pixel Print Ltd. It was originated and developed in the early 1960s by the
Electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...
Department of
Vero Precision Engineering Ltd Vero Precision Engineering Ltd (VPE) was a UK machine-tool manufacturing company which operated from premises at 7 South Mill Rd, Southampton SO15 4JW. The 1933 O.S. Map shows this location as Crown Works occupied by an electrical engineering ...
(VPE). It was introduced as a general-purpose material for use in constructing
electronic circuits An electronic circuit is composed of individual electronic components, such as resistors, transistors, capacitors, inductors and diodes, connected by conductive wires or traces through which electric current can flow. It is a type of electrical ...
- differing from purpose-designed
printed circuit boards A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a laminated sandwich struc ...
(PCBs) in that a variety of electronics circuits may be constructed using a standard wiring board. In using the board, breaks are made in the tracks, usually around holes, to divide the strips into multiple electrical nodes. With care, it is possible to break between holes to allow for components that have two pin rows only one position apart such as twin row headers for IDCs. Stripboard is not designed for surface-mount components, though it is possible to mount many such components on the track side, particularly if tracks are cut/shaped with a knife or small cutting disc in a
rotary tool Die grinders and rotary tools are handheld power tools used for grinding, sanding, honing, polishing, or machining material (typically metal, but also plastic or wood). All such tools are conceptually similar, with no bright dividing line bet ...
. The first single-size Veroboard product was the forerunner of the numerous types of
prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototyp ...
wiring board which, with worldwide use over five decades, have become known as stripboard. The
generic term Trademark distinctiveness is an important concept in the law governing trademarks and service marks. A trademark may be eligible for registration, or registrable, if it performs the essential trademark function, and has distinctive character. Re ...
s 'veroboard' and 'stripboard' are now taken to be synonymous.


History

upVeroboard patent By the mid-1950s, the
printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in Electrical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a L ...
(PCB) had become commonplace in electronics production. In early 1959, the VPE Electronics Department was formed when managing director Geoffrey Verdon-Roe hired two former
Saunders-Roe Saunders-Roe Limited, also known as Saro, was a British aero- and marine-engineering company based at Columbine Works, East Cowes, Isle of Wight. History The name was adopted in 1929 after Alliott Verdon Roe (see Avro) and John Lord took a c ...
Ltd employees, Peter H Winter ( aircraft design department) and Terry Fitzpatrick (electronics division). After the failure of a project to develop machine tool control equipment, the department remained operative as a result of success with the
invention An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an i ...
and development of the new material. New equipment using PCBs was displayed at the 1959 Radio and Electronics Components Manufacturers Federation (RECMF) Exhibition held in
The Dorchester The Dorchester is a five-star luxury hotel on Park Lane and Deanery Street in London, to the east of Hyde Park. It is one of the world's most prestigious and expensive hotels. The Dorchester opened on 18 April 1931, and it still retains its ...
Hotel, Park Lane, London. The usual configuration for most of the PCBs of that time had components placed in a regular pattern with the circuit formed by maze-like conductive pathways. An interesting alternative, proposed by Fitzpatrick after visiting the RECMF Exhibition on behalf of VPE, envisaged a standard circuit board carrying straight-line conductors on which the components could be suitably dispersed and connected to the conductors to produce the required circuit. A
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
application was immediately filed 25 May 1959 and the invention was developed for Vero by associates Winter, Fitzpatrick and machine shop engineers. The advent of the
Arduino Arduino () is an open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its hardware products are licensed unde ...
integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...
, designed to introduce computer programming to newcomers unfamiliar with software development, presents a new opportunity to use Veroboard. Arduino development regularly involves the use of '
shield A shield is a piece of personal armour held in the hand, which may or may not be strapped to the wrist or forearm. Shields are used to intercept specific attacks, whether from close-ranged weaponry or projectiles such as arrows, by means of a ...
s', which plug into the main Arduino board using standard 0.1 in header connections and carry project-specific I/O hardware. However the Arduino design makes this difficult, as one of the four header sockets is offset from the 0.1 in spacing of the others by 0.05 in. The British company
Vero Technologies Ltd Vero Technologies Ltd is a UK company located at Hedge End, Hampshire, UK and formed in 2003 after the APW Electronics Group went into administration. The APW intellectual property was sold off to various companies around the world with the protot ...
currently holds the UK trademark for Veroboard. In the Americas the Veroboard trademark is now held by the Canadian company Pixel Print Ltd. of Vancouver.


Hole spacing

Stripboard holes are drilled on centers. This spacing allows components having pins with a spacing to be inserted. Compatible parts include DIP ICs, sockets for ICs, some types of connectors, and other devices. Stripboards have evolved over time into several variants and related products. For example, a larger version using a 0.15 inch (3.81 mm) grid and larger holes is available, but is generally less popular (presumably because it does not match up with standard IC pin spacing).


Board dimensions

Stripboard is available in a variety of sizes. One common size (at least in the United Kingdom) is 160 mm x 100 mm.


Assemblies

An example of a populated stripboard The components are usually placed on the plain side of the board, with their leads protruding through the holes. The leads are then
soldered Solder (; NA: ) is a fusible metal alloy used to create a permanent bond between metal workpieces. Solder is melted in order to wet the parts of the joint, where it adheres to and connects the pieces after cooling. Metals or alloys suitable ...
to the copper tracks on the other side of the board to make the desired connections, and any excess wire is cut off. The continuous tracks may be easily and neatly cut as desired to form breaks between conductors using a 3 mm twist drill, a hand cutter made for the purpose, or a knife. Tracks may be linked up on either side of the board using wire. With practice, very neat and reliable assemblies can be created, though such a method is labour-intensive and therefore unsuitable for production assemblies except in very small quantity. External wire connections to the board are made either by soldering the wires through the holes or, for wires too thick to pass through the holes, by soldering them to specially made pins called Veropins which fit tightly into the holes. Alternatively, some types of connectors have a suitable pin spacing to be inserted directly into the board.


Production

Production of the proposed new product, Veroboard, was undertaken by the VPE machine tool department. Bought-in sheets of 1.6 mm (0.06 in) copper-clad SRBP
printed circuit A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a laminated sandwich struct ...
material were cut to give 122 mm x 456 mm (4.8 in x 18 in) size boards with the individual boards then being machined to form the final product according to the original Veroboard specification. A multiple
milling cutter Milling cutters are cutting tools typically used in milling machines or machining centres to perform milling operations (and occasionally in other machine tools). They remove material by their movement within the machine (e.g., a ball nose mill ...
tool, which comprised a bank of side-and-face cutters with suitably shaped cutting teeth, was fabricated, to be used in removing part of the bonded copper on each board leaving 21 conductive strips. For a second operation a special tool with 63 hardened punch bits 1.35 mm (0.052 in) in diameter mounted on a solid base block was constructed to repeat-punch a matrix of holes, on spacing, through the copper strips and the base board. Many dimensional, material quality, and tooling problems were encountered before finished boards of acceptable quality could be produced in quantity. These machining problems were encountered due to the non-availability, in 1960, of advanced printed circuit board milling and drilling techniques or facilities for
chemical milling Chemical milling or industrial etching is the subtractive manufacturing process of using baths of temperature-regulated etching chemicals to remove material to create an object with the desired shape. Other names for chemical etching incl ...
(etching) the copper strips. In 1961, as production rates improved with experience, Vero Electronics Ltd was formed as a separate company to market the increasing sales of Veroboard.


Use

1961 Veroboard unit - components 1961 Veroboard unit - copper 1961 Veroboard Display Board As with other stripboards, in using Veroboard, components are suitably positioned and soldered to the conductors to form the required circuit. Breaks can be made in the tracks, usually around holes, to divide the strips into multiple electrical nodes enabling increased circuit complexity. This type of wiring board may be used for initial electronic circuit development, to construct
prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototyp ...
s for bench testing or in the production of complete electronic units in small quantity. Veroboard was first used for prototype construction within Vero Electronics Department in 1961. The images of a
binary Binary may refer to: Science and technology Mathematics * Binary number, a representation of numbers using only two digits (0 and 1) * Binary function, a function that takes two arguments * Binary operation, a mathematical operation that ta ...
decade
counter Counter may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Counter machine, a subclass of register machines * Counter (digital), an electronic device, mechanical device, or computer program for counting * Loop counter, the variable that controls the iter ...
sub-unit clearly show both the assembled components and the copper conductors with the required discontinuities. A number of these sub-units were interconnected through connectors mounted on a motherboard similar to that shown in the Veroboard Display image and comprised a very early PCB-based
backplane A backplane (or "backplane system") is a group of electrical connectors in parallel with each other, so that each pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin of all the other connectors, forming a computer bus. It is used as a back ...
system. Each sub-unit had a digital capacity equivalent to 1/2
byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
of data storage - i.e. 2,000,000 would be required to store 1
megabyte The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...
. Two forms of Veroboard are produced with hole pitch of 2.54 mm (0.1 in) or 3.5 mm (0.15 in). The larger pitch is and was considered easier to assemble, especially at a time when many constructors were still more familiar with
valves A valve is a device or natural object that regulates, directs or controls the flow of a fluid (gases, liquids, fluidized solids, or slurries) by opening, closing, or partially obstructing various passageways. Valves are technically fitting ...
and tag strips. The increasingly popular
integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
s in dual in-line packages would only fit the 0.1 boards. Very soon 0.1 pitch became by far the dominant form. Integrated circuits and the common layout of short parallel strips protruding from the sides of an IC package encouraged the development of specialist boards such as Verostrip. This was a long, thin board with the copper strips arranged transversely, rather than the usual lengthwise. A ready-cut central gap was provided to isolate the sides of the IC. A 1979 Vero Electronics Ltd
production drawing Production drawings (sometimes called working drawings) are complete sets of drawings that detail the manufacturing and assembly of products (as distinct from engineering drawings prepared by and/or for product engineers whose task is to decide h ...
shows a special Veroboard product made for
RS Components RS Group plc (formerly Electrocomponents plc) is a distributor of industrial and electronics products based in London, England. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. History The company was foun ...
Ltd. The versatility of the veroboard/stripboard type of product is demonstrated by the large number of design examples currently (2013-07) to be found on the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
.


Variations

Stripboard is available from many vendors. All versions have copper strips on one side. Some are made using
printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in Electrical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a L ...
etching and drilling techniques, although some have milled strips and punched holes. The original Veroboard used FR-2 synthetic-resin-bonded paper (SRBP) (also known as phenolic board) as the base board material. Some versions of stripboard now use higher quality FR-4 (fiberglass-reinforced epoxy laminate) material.


Comparison with other systems

For high density prototyping, especially of digital circuits,
wire wrap Wire wrap is an electronic component assembly technique that was invented to wire telephone crossbar switches, and later adapted to construct electronic circuit boards. Electronic components mounted on an insulating board are interconnected by l ...
is faster and more reliable than Stripboard for experienced personnel. Veroboard is similar in concept and usage to a plug-in breadboard, but is cheaper and more permanent—connections are soldered and while some limited reuse may be possible, more than a few cycles of soldering and desoldering are likely to render both the components and the board unusable. In contrast, breadboard connections are held by friction, and the breadboard can be reused many times. However, a breadboard is not very suitable for prototyping that needs to remain in a set configuration for an appreciable period of time nor for physical mock-ups containing a working circuit or for any environment subject to vibration or movement. Stripboards have further evolved into a larger class of prototype boards, available in different shapes and sizes, with different conductive trace layouts. For example, one variant is called a TriPad board. This is similar to stripboard, except that the conductive tracks do not run continuously along the board but are broken into sections, each of which spans three holes. This allows the legs of two or three components to be easily linked together in the circuit conveniently without the need for track breaks to be made. However, in order to link more than three holes together, wire links or bridges must be formed and this can result in a less compact layout than is possible with ordinary stripboard. Another variant is Perf+. This is best described as a selective stripboard. Instead of having all the holes connected together in a strip, a Perf+ board can have holes connected to the bus using a small dab of solder. On the other side the busses run in another direction, allowing compact layouts of complicated circuits by passing signals over each other on different layers of the board. Other prototype board variants have generic layouts to simplify building prototypes with
integrated circuits An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
, typically in DIP shapes, or with transistors (pads forming triangles). In particular, some boards mimic the layout of breadboards, to simplify moving a non-permanent prototype on a breadboard to a permanent construction on a
PCB PCB may refer to: Science and technology * Polychlorinated biphenyl, an organic chlorine compound, now recognized as an environmental toxin and classified as a persistent organic pollutant * Printed circuit board, a board used in electronics * ...
. Some types of boards have patterns for connectors on the periphery, like DB9 or IDC headers, to allow connectors with non-standard pin spacings to be easily used.BusBoard Prototype Systems Ltd
"PR3UC ProtoBoard With Connectors Datasheet"
Retrieved on 2010-10-20.
Some come in special physical shapes, to be used to prototype plug-in boards for computer bus systems.


See also

*
Point-to-point construction Point-to-point construction is a non-automated method of construction of electronics Electronic circuit, circuits widely used before the use of printed circuit boards (PCBs) and automated assembly gradually became widespread following their intr ...
* Breadboard *
Perfboard Perfboard is a material for prototyping electronic circuits (also called DOT PCB). It is a thin, rigid sheet with holes pre-drilled at standard intervals across a grid, usually a square grid of spacing. These holes are ringed by round or square ...


References

{{refs de:Leiterplatte#Prototypen Electronics substrates British inventions Brands that became generic