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From: bwc@ganehd.UUCP (Brantley Coile)
Newsgroups: net.arch,net.micro
Subject: How to fab One-Of-A-Kind systems?
Message-ID: <202@ganehd.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 1-May-85 21:08:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: ganehd.202
Posted: Wed May  1 21:08:22 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 6-May-85 03:36:18 EDT
Organization: NE Health District, Athens, Georgia
Lines: 54
Xref: watmath net.arch:1149 net.micro:10260


I want to build some one-of-a-kind stuff to try out ideas on
parallel systems.  My first question is how should I
fabricate the equipment.  While this may be an easy question
to answer for production design, it is not so easy for a
OOAK system.

My choices are:

1)        wire wrap

2)        make a pc board

I don't like (2) because of the cost and effort.  Doing the
artwork and having made sounds time consuming and expensive.
It does give me very reliable stuff.  It also make debugging
impossible.

I don't like (1) because of reliability.  I understand that
as wire wrap ages it develops the flakies.

This leaves me with -

3)        point to point

I could do (3) if I used a solderless circuit board to
prototype and do point to point when the board was debugged.
This led me to another problem; I would need one heck of a
solderless circuit board to debug stuff.

Why?  Why do boards have to be so big?  If I were going to
build a million of them I could see the benefit of reduced
chip count that could come from a large board.  I assume
that there could also be a lot of savings in other things
with a larger board size.  But I don't care about any of
them.  If system design is similar for hardware as software,
the smaller, functional boards would be better.

I am not saying that the boards should be interfaced with
some bus definition like STD, S-100, MultiBus, etc.  Each
board would be more of a module than a board, each with
inputs and output.  If I did this I could debug them one the
solderless circuit board and when working make the point-
to-point board.

Well, what do you think.  As you might have guessed I'm not
a hardware engineer although I have built a small micro.

Please send me you thoughts on the matter.
-- 

		Brantley Coile CCP
		..!akgua!ganehd!bwc
		Northeast Health District, Athens, Ga