DIP Sockets and High Frequency

Trezitorul

I am hoping to run a DAC via a 30Mhz SPI interface with the propstick and I am wondering will a 40 pin dip socket cause any problems or should I solder the propstick straight in to my boards?

-Trezitorul

Mike Green

At 30MHz, a DIP socket is not likely to make any significant difference. What will matter are things like the length of the connections between the PropStick and the DAC, other (adjacent) signals present along the connections, the amount and quality of any shielding (ground planes) along the connections, and the power supply bypassing on the DAC and PropStick.

RickInTexas

I'd highly recommend a quality machine pin socket. They grip much tighter than the cheap "two finger" contacts.

When I worked on a depot-level repair contract we would get in Apple II boards with cheap sockets. The display was just completely garbled and unusable. The solution was to replace every socket with machine types. Solved the problem every time.

I just researched this a bit and it looks like it's not a good idea to mate dissimilar metals. Personally, I've not paid much attention to this and have had no problems. I thought that gold is always best, but perhaps not.

Hopefully someone with expert knowledge can chime in

Mike Green

Quality machine pin sockets are very nice. They're also relatively expensive because of the additional work to form them. Given that you're not mass producing whatever you're making where pennies count, I'd get a good quality machine pin socket. In terms of contact metals, you've got two choices ... gold or tin. Both are good choices. ICs will generally have tin coated pins and these work well with either gold or tin..