45_dsPIC33 Pinout Board
Before Christmas Break, I had been working on making a pinout board for our dsPIC33 so that we could begin testing with it before using it in the final design. Up until now, we have been using a dsPIC30 for testing basic PIC functions such as PWM and General Purpose I/O. We were able to make a pinout board for the dsPIC33 (Figure 1), but have been unable to solder the IC onto the board because of solder masking limitations. For IC’s with fewer pins, solder paste can be placed manually on the pads as we did with some other IC’s (Figure 2), but because the 100 pin TQFP package the sPIC33 is in, it is unlikely that we could solder-paste it manually without shorting pins. The other option was to have the Protomat S63 place the solder, but it can only place solder on pads greater than 16mil, and the IC’s pins were around 8mil.
Figure 1: Pinout Board for sPIC33 Made Using S63 (no solder on pads yet)
Figure 2: Solder Paste Placed Manually On PCB Pads for Previous Boards
I didn’t realize until recently that cheap PCB boards specifically for 100-pin TQFP .4mm pitch IC’s were available online, so I ordered 3 for about $10 (Figure 3). They already have solder on the pads so that connecting an IC to the board is very easy. Our dsPIC33 was soldered onto the board along with some header sockets (Figure 4), and we were able to have basic code running on it today.
Figure 3: Purchased Pinout PCB for 100-pin TQFP .4mm-pitch Devices
Figure 4: dsPIC33 and Headers On Purchased Pinout Board
