Electronic – TDA7386 mounting

integrated-circuitmount

I'm working on a little project to build an audio amplifier and I have everything ready except that I cannot figure out how to connect TDA7386 to the circuit. Is wire wrapping the only choice here? Or is there a simpler way to mount the chip? I would want to avoid soldering as much as possible since it's still within its prototyping stage.

It's this little guy here:

enter image description here

Best Answer

This is clearly meant to be soldered. You said you want to avoid soldering, but your reason that you're still in the prototype stage doesn't make sense. You don't say what this TDA7386 thing does nor did you provide a link, but if it's a audio power amp then it will need good solid power connectections at the very least.

I would solder it on the board along with everything else. That way you can eliminate bad connections as one issue when you're testing the circuit. It also lets you put bypass caps locally right where they are needed, have better all around signal integrety, etc. Signal to noise ratio is a big issue with audio circuits, so for meaningful testing you should be using a layout and interconnect as close as possible to the final product.

Think about the cost too. The time to wire warp this, connect all those little wires to the board, check it, deal with the resulting screwups anyway, deal with the questionable supply and ground and signals, all add up to more than adding the footprint to the boad and soldering this part. Sooner or later you'll have to make the footprint and include it in your circuit, so doing it now doesn't cost any time in the long run. In other words, putting everything on a board is cheaper than some flaky rigged up test circuit with flying leads all over the place.

Added:

Now that the datasheet is available, I advise you even more strongly not to try wire wrapping this. This is a power amp with significant currents. Merely hooking up the amp is easy, but good layout is important. You therefore want to test that in your very first prototype. There will be enough current flowing around that ground offsets, crosstalk, and possibly even unstable operation due to unexpected feedback are all possibilities and things that need to be addressed by careful layout.

A sortof working circuit with wires all over the place won't tell much other than you hooked it up right, and that's the 1% problem. At worst, the wire wrap version will have all sorts of problems, which will be quite different when you put this thing on a board. Note the suggested layout section in the datasheet. You don't usually see that for parts unless the layout is a important part of the design.

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