electronics Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other Electric charge, electrically charged particles. It is a subfield ...

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 ...

means building an actual circuit to a theoretical

design A design is the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word ''design'' refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something ...

to verify that it works, and to provide a physical platform for debugging it if it does not. The prototype is often constructed using techniques such as

wire wrap Close-up of a wire-wrap connection Typical wire wrap construction of crossbar_switch.html" ;"title="Bell System telephone crossbar switch">Bell System telephone crossbar switch. Some types of connection were soldered. Wire wrap is an electron ...

ping or using 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 h ...

stripboard Stripboard is the generic name for a widely used type of electronics Electronic prototype, prototyping material for circuit boards characterized by a pre-formed regular (rectangular) grid of holes, with wide parallel strips of copper cladding ...

perfboard Perfboard is a material for prototyping electronic circuits. 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 copper pads, though ...

, with the result being a circuit that is electrically identical to the design but not physically identical to the final product. Open-source tools like

Fritzing Fritzing is an open-source software, open-source initiative to develop amateur or hobby CAD software for the Electronic design automation, design of electronics hardware, intended to allow designers and artists to build more permanent circuits fro ...

exist to document electronic prototypes (especially the breadboard-based ones) and move toward physical production. Prototyping platforms such as

Arduino Arduino () is an Italian open-source hardware and open-source software, software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its hardwar ...

also simplify the task of programming and interacting with a

microcontroller A microcontroller (MC, uC, or μC) or microcontroller unit (MCU) is a small computer on a single integrated circuit. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs (processor cores) along with memory and programmable input/output peripherals. Pro ...

. The developer can choose to deploy their invention as-is using the prototyping platform, or replace it with only the microcontroller chip and the circuitry that is relevant to their product. A technician can quickly build a prototype (and make additions and modifications) using these techniques, but for volume production it is much faster and usually cheaper to mass-produce custom

printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB), also called printed wiring board (PWB), is a Lamination, laminated sandwich structure of electrical conduction, conductive and Insulator (electricity), insulating layers, each with a pattern of traces, planes ...

s than to produce these other kinds of prototype boards. The proliferation of quick-turn PCB fabrication and assembly companies has enabled the concepts of rapid prototyping to be applied to electronic circuit design. It is now possible, even with the smallest passive components and largest fine-pitch packages, to have boards fabricated, assembled, and even tested in a matter of days.

Boards

Breadboard

Perfboard

Stripboard

References