Beginner's questions before sending for print

[Piotr]

@X4V1

@nickmBY

It is often a good idea to have one layer as a ground fill. Even with just a two layer PCB. So you don’t have to route every GND line manually. If that pour gets interrupted, you can easyly stitch it back together with a short track on the opposide side.

It is was I did, I even have a ground zone on the two sides I forgot to mention it in the first place. Thanks

From EMC point of view ground fill should have no gaps. Each signal has associated with it return current. The higher frequency (the shorter rise/fall times) the return current travels no the shortest way back but prefers to travel just under the line with signal. Whenever signal line jumps over gap in GND fill the return current have to travel the longer way what makes the area surrounded by current much bigger and the same way EMC emissions higher and the sensitivity of the circuit to disturbances also higher.
So the best from EMC point of view is to have one continuous GND fill. All my 2 layer PCBs have no signal lines at bottom as to have continuous GND.
An example of such design I shown some time ago:

Approaching PCB track routing for a newbie

Positioning for me is the main work in designing PCB. If each element is where it is needed than routing is simple. Till now all my PCBs are 2 layers and all of them have GND plane taking 100% of bottom layer. So except GND I design my PCBs as 1 layer. I use microcontrollers in QFP packages without thermal pad at bottom. This allows me to go with VCC under the microcontroller and go out through all corners and all VCC pins. That way GND and VCC don’t disturb my signal connections. At all digi…

If you want to read more about EMC see links I gave some time ago:

Decoupling capacitor via placement

I didn’t read that book but I suppose you can replace it with: I think it is enough for most pcb designers.

Decoupling capacitor via placement

About 2004 I found an interesting serie of EMC articles by Keith Armstrong (for many years I didn’t know if Keith is a woman or men name). Later they became no accessible, but when I tried to find them few years ago I found them once more: http://www.compliance-club.com/pdf/DesignTechniquesPart1.pdf http://www.compliance-club.com/pdf/DesignTechniquesPart2.pdf http://www.compliance-club.com/pdf/DesignTechniquesPart3.pdf http://www.compliance-club.com/pdf/DesignTechniquesPart4.pdf http://www…