Dr. Alvar Saenz-Otero
In the past building prototypes of electronic components for new projects/products was limited to using protoboards and wirewrap. Manufacturing a printed-circuit-board was limited to final production, where mistakes in the implementation meant physically cutting traces on the board and adding wire jumpers - the final products would have these fixes on them! Today that is no longer the case, while you will still cut traces and use jumpers when debugging a board, manufacturing a new final version without the errors is a simple and relatively inexpensive task. For that matter, manufacturing a prototype printed circuit board which you know is likely to have errors but which will get the design substantially closer to the final product than a protoboard setup is not only possible, but desirable. In this class, you'll learn to design, build, and debug printed-circuit-boards.
Saenz-Otero, Alvar. 16.682 Prototyping Avionics, Spring 2006. (MIT OpenCourseWare: Massachusetts Institute of Technology), http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-682-prototyping-avionics-spring-2006 (Accessed). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA