I have mounted the 9850 and 9851 chips dead bug like this before. It is
an extremely painful process, but doable. Be very careful with the
leads, I had one of the pins of a 9851 break off. You really only get
to bend a pin once. Don't try bending it twice! I have mounted a lot
of DIP and SOIC chips deadbug and have almost never had a pin come off
(ok, maybe once, but it was kind of abused), but TSSOP packages such as
this are more fragile.

Except for the ground connections, which I bend over for direction
connection to the ground, I bent every other pin either up or out a bit
to get a little more space for the connections. I used #32 gauge enamel
wire for interconnect. When mounting the device, pre-tin all leads in
advance and tack the device in place by soldering the ground leads, and
connecting the power leads via bypass caps.

When making a connection to the part or wire to the chip, pre-tin the
part and touch solder the part or wire to the pin. This is very
difficult as the heat from the tip can melt an adjacent connected wire
or part.

It is easy to create solder bridges across pins. Solder wick or a
solder sucker, or an exacto knife can be use to open up such a bridge as
the solder is heated with a iron. Some time a bit of fresh solder with
fresh flux helps undo the bridge.

Patience, patience, patience!

It is difficult to do, but it can be done, and the results can be quite
rewarding.

As far as 5v to 1.8v logic level conversions, the very simplest thing is
to use a 2N7000 MOSFET transistor for each signal. The gate can be
directly driven with the 5v signal, and the output can be pulled up to
1.8v with a 2.2K resistor. It is cool to deadbug with the surface mount
version of these parts (SOT-23) and use a 805 size chip pull up
resistor. The resulting "inverter" in very small! The signal will be
inverted, but just keep that in mind when writing the software.

I use the surface mount FETS (BSS123/2N7000) in the receiver diplexer in
my home brew transceivers, and they don't take up much space!

- Dan, N7VE

kenneth scharf wrote:

I just got some samples of the AD9952 and AD9954 DDS chips.
Both look identical, AD9954 has some extra features I don't need
but can simply not program. These parts are real small, will have
to find some VERY small tweezers to bend the leads and file down
a soldering tip to fit. I would try to solder all the gnd and unused
inputs down to a PC ground plane and bend all the power pins up
flat against the top of the chip to be soldered together. The signal
pins would have to be bent up halfway and fly leads soldered on
to go to the rest of the circuit on perfboard.

Anybody try to breadboard one of these 'dead bug' style like this?
Anyone have some circuit advise on using these chips? I am thinking
of using one in a single conversion transceiver. Mixers will be
DBM using push pull digital drive so the DDS will drive a 74xx74
divider and be driven at twice the LO frequency. (several examples
of such receiver front ends in recent ARRL HB's). IF will be 9mhz,
I have 4 identical 9mzh filters, so will use 3 in rx if and 1 in tx.
(got those filters at Dayton about 10 years ago... Clegg surplus).

Was thinking of using 8051 series micro, the built in serial port will
drive the AD98xx and AD99xx dds chips. Question....how do I convert
the 5v digital io of the 8052 micro to the 1.8v levels used by the
AD995x series, or is the DDS chip 5v compatible (on input maybe...
what to do about output? especially on the bidirection serial line....)

Was also thinking about maybe building the rig as a 6 meter single
conversion with an HF transverter front end. What do you think of
this idea?

73's WA2MZE