A breadboard, or protoboard, is a construction base for prototyping of electronics. Originally the word referred to a literal bread board, a polished piece of wood used when slicing bread. In the 1970s the solderless breadboard (a.k.a. plugboard, a terminal array board) became available and nowadays the term "breadboard" is commonly used to refer to these.
Because the solderless breadboard does not require soldering, it is reusable. This makes it easy to use for creating temporary prototypes and experimenting with circuit design. For this reason, solderless breadboards are also popular with students and in technological education. Older breadboard types did not have this property. A stripboard (Veroboard) and similar prototyping printed circuit boards, which are used to build semi-permanent soldered prototypes or one-offs, cannot easily be reused. A variety of electronic systems may be prototyped by using breadboards, from small analog and digital circuits to complete central processing units (CPUs).
Compared to more permanent circuit connection methods, modern breadboards have high parasitic capacitance, relatively high resistance, and less reliable connections, which are subject to jostle and physical degradation. Signaling is limited to about 10 MHz, and not everything works properly even well below that frequency.
A common use in the system on a chip (SoC) era is to obtain an microcontroller (MCU) on a pre-assembled printed circuit board (PCB) which exposes an array of input/output (IO) pins in a header suitable to plug into a breadboard, and then to prototype a circuit which exploits one or more of the MCU's peripherals, such as general-purpose input/output (GPIO), UART/USART serial transceivers, analog-to-digital converter (ADC), digital-to-analog converter (DAC), pulse-width modulation (PWM; used in motor control), Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), or I²C.
Firmware is then developed for the MCU to test, debug, and interact with the circuit prototype. High frequency operation is then largely confined to the SoC's PCB. In the case of high speed interconnects such as SPI and I²C, these can be debugged at a lower speed and later rewired using a different circuit assembly methodology to exploit full-speed operation. A single small SoC often provides most of these electrical interface options in a form factor barely larger than a large postage stamp, available in the American hobby market (and elsewhere) for a few dollars, allowing fairly sophisticated breadboard projects to be created at modest expense.