One prototyping technique that is quick and dirty is a technique called bread-ball or something like that.
BTW: I did not invent this technique. It's a very common technique used in the electronics industry.
This technique gets you results very quick, is flexible and is is easier than most other prototyping techniques. It also competes very well with designs that runs without any hitches at high frequencies up to 1GHZ if done nicely.
Drawbacks include: Not very suitable or stable mechanically or for actual use.
Here's the technique. I have described this before elsewhere.
In DC/DC converters and very fast designs it is very important to have good solid ground.
So, why not use a large ground plane? To do this means you want to solder everything that is going to ground to a bare copper board. The board will serve as your ground plane.
Start with the IC. Identify all the pins that go to ground. Then bend all the other pins out flat and horizontal to the IC making a mini-airplane. The ground pins should be left alone pointing down.
Now you can solder the ICs ground pins to the ground plane. This holds the IC down if there are more than one pin. One pin the IC is unstable at this point. (We will fix this in a second).
Identify any IC pins that have a resistor or capacitor to ground. Tilting SMT capacitors or resistor you can lean them onto the associated pins and solder them to the IC and ground. This now adds mechanical support and the IC should be very stable now.
You could also use standard through hole resistors and capacitors if you don't want to use SMT components here. Through hole resistors are sometimes easier to change being a little larger and easier to work with.
Next Determine the best component placements of the remaining components noting input capacitors and output capacitors will be soldered directly to the plane to make their ground connection. (Again I will note that you can use standard through hole components here as well)
Using components soldered to the ground plane, wire the remaining components in free air connecting them to standing components or using wire as necessary.
Continue this until the whole circuit is wired up. If you need more posts, you can use standard through hole resistors of high value as mechanical tie points. Vin could be wired to a resistor to ground and this would relieve the strain of the long input wire. From the resistor add a wire to the input capacitor for example.
The switching inductor in a boost circuit is not wired to ground and would be wired point to point in free air to the appropriate two locations.
This style of bread-ball can actually place components closer than the actual final layout since you are taking advantage of the Z axis.
It is rather easy in this way to change inductor values, input capacitor values by unsoldering the one component and replacing it with another one. Sometimes the size changes as you experiment around and this allows the design to grow shrink as needed.
A good bread-ball built this way typically has as good characteristics as the final design with low parasitic capacitances and a very solid ground plane.
Just one thought.
Other techniques included cutting the copper into several sections like VCC, GND and VOUT. More components would be soldered to the copper clad board in this way. A minimum division down the middle could be VIN and GND. Scoring the copper with a ruler and an Exacto knife and then removing it with a hot tool (soldering iron or wood burning tool heats). A dremel can be used to remove the copper.
Etching the board yourself is another option, and there are many techniques here as well.
Wayne
