[sdiy] Dual ground planes

[Tim Ressel]

David,

Are you talking 2-layer here? I'll assume you are. Also I'll assume you're not 
going for EMC compliance here. Mostly dual ground planes give you better ground 
paths (obviously). This becomes an issue if there are lots of traces cutting 
across the board. Also if you have mixed signal (analog&digital) having planes 
on both sides can make splitting the ground planes easier.

Given all of that, ground planes are not critical to the basic design. But as 
performance requirements go up the use of ground planes become necessary. As an 
example, I just added a quantizer to my Muse thingie. It is all hand-wired with 
no ground planes. The signals are okay, but I can see little wiggles when I poke 
around the circuit. Most likely from inferior grounds. The circuit works, but 
could be better.

Hope that helps.

--TimR





----- Original Message ----
From: David Ingebretsen <dingebre at 3dphysics.net>
To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
Sent: Tue, August 3, 2010 9:52:00 AM
Subject: [sdiy] Dual ground planes

Is there any advantage/disadvantage to having two ground planes on a PCB?
I've noticed incomplete coverage on a couple of the PCBs I'm working on and
also different coverage for a top ground plane versus a bottom ground plane.
If I put a ground plane on the top and bottom, I get about 99% coverage. I
can see that soldering will be even more annoying to ground pads with two
planes, but is the annoyance worth having the more complete coverage?

Thanks

David

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