Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Die form, PDIP and SOIC packaging - what?

Status
Not open for further replies.

hack

New Member
So I'm guessing that one of these is the chip with the legs like a 28 pin chip that I can buy a socket for. But which is that and what are the other two?

I know they make chips with no legs they stick right on the board with no holes and just solder to the legs of the chips - can anyone help me out and tell me which is which?

My take is that I would buy the one with legs to go into a socket or a test board, but if I ordered like - 1000, I would use the small ones that are put on the board with no legs.

Thanks in advance.
 
DIP is dual inline parallel- it's the one with pins and the one that can go into sockets.

I think die form is just the silicon which is quite useless to almost everyone except companies that want to use their own special IC package for whatever reason.

SOIC is like a smaller version of the DIP, and it does not have through-hole pins. Rather, it's pins point straight out and are shurter and are surface mount.
 
Thanks that makes sense. I'm familiar with DIP and SOIC then - just didn't know the names.

I've bought small boards before which have epoxy on the chip so you cannot see what it is - looks like a hardened black blob on the chip. Is this probably how the die form is used then?
 
No, it's just a regular IC. The blob is so you can't reverse engineer whatever is being used.

A die from still needs to be placed into a IC package which may be a DIP or SOIC. BUt if it is bought in that form, it's probably going to be stuck in some custom package for whatever reason.
 
Cool thanks Guys!
 
I thought die form was for chip-on-board mounting. the epoxy blob is to protect the connection cat-wiskers.
 
Hey found out SOIC = Small Outline IC --- AKA surface mount.
 
hack said:
I've bought small boards before which have epoxy on the chip so you cannot see what it is - looks like a hardened black blob on the chip. Is this probably how the die form is used then?
You're right.

dknguyen said:
dknguyenNo, it's just a regular IC. The blob is so you can't reverse engineer whatever is being used.
Normally that isn't the case if you look at the reverse of the PCB in a watch or a small cheap and nasty pocket calculator, you'll see the tiny connections to the die.

I've even got the PCB from an LED marker used to mark hazards on the roads. The IC is light sesitive and is mounted directly to the PCB and is encased in a transparant ruber, it turns off in the light and off in the dark. The LED is PWMd and the light from the LED actually shines on the light sensitive IC, I assume it looks to see if they're any dark periods in-between the pulses of light from the LED to tel whether it's day or night time.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top