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bigmeanie

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    bigmeanie got a reaction from AbydosOne in is there any efficient way to trace/routing pcb/connections besides going by bruteforce?   
    It has been a while since I've done the engineering side of things and most of my experience with that was more signal processing rather than digital, just so we are all on the same page of where we are coming from and I cut my teeth in that before computer aided design was a mainstream thing. 
         
    First step is to block diagram things out and you are going to need to determine what NEEDS to be close to each other.  As well as what HAS to be mounted on some specific parts of the board for external IO reasons.  This is why you tend to see the Ram right next to the processor, because the more length that is on those traces means the more places for obnoxious kinky stuff to happen.  And keep in mind that the higher of a frequency you work with the less the quarter wavelength of what makes a valid antenna for it is and this is not even going into capacitive loading or funky harmonics stuff. And very often in that you are going to need all of the traces to be of a comparable length due to that whole pesky speed of light thingie (although there is some kinkyness that goes into the planning of this as well, you can gate a hundred paths one right after the other and skew the trace lengths so that the signal all gets to the destination at the same time, this is a thing) 
        
    Next you need to go into what HAS to be far apart, things such as power supplies and rf mixers tend to be segregated, as we really don't need any noise from those components getting into the sensitive stuff. 
         
    Now thankfully by and large you can just layout your traces to be more or less analogous to the schematic, it may not be the most 'space efficient' means of doing it but it will be somewhat close, in older systems they use to get around the limitation of having a lack of board layers with having a vertical mounted board mounted across the length of the circuit board to....get around the limitations of only having one or two layers to work with. 
    After that your power delivery tends to be given via jumper wires as well in many older systems as well.
        
     
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