TQFP-80 breakout board for Microchip PICs.

A year ago, I needed to prototype a design which used PIC18F8722. It’s a nice microcontroller with plenty of ROM, RAM, and peripherals. It comes in 80 pin 0.5mm pitch TQFP package. To use it in prototyping, I designed breakout board which holds the micro, crystal, and filter and decupling capacitors. With time, I changed the layout to accommodate other PICs in the same package and recently made a variant which takes any 80-pin PIC in TQFP-80 package in production, at the time of this writing. This includes:

• older PIC18Fs
• newer J-series PIC18s
• “Classic” dsPIC30
• J-series dsPICs
• PIC24s

Each pin is routed to standard 0.1″ header. In addition, 0603 decoupling capacitors are routed at each of the power pins on the solder side, as well as 3×5 SMT crystal and accompanying 0603 capacitors. In order to be able to use different power configurations, several jumpers have been incorporated to the design. Everything except crystal and crystal load caps is routed on the top side; the bottom side serves as ground plane.

By soldering some pins face down the board can be made suitable for plugging to the breadboard and then air wired to other circuits. I found that air wiring works much better than direct bread boarding at frequencies above 4MHz.

Full documentation, including Eagle schematic and board layout, as well as Gerber files, can be downloaded from downloads section.

Bare boards are available from the store. The price is $7.50. Shipping for USA is $2.00. If you need them shipped elsewhere in the world, contact me for price.

Oleg.