Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

Have done a number of boost and buck converters, down to .5mm. Done them all single sided. If you fiddle with the layout you can get the traces pretty short. Look at the data sheets, there is usually layout recommendation art work. The most important point is to make the grounds to the chip and caps a single point ground, usually need to run a wide trace under the chip to do this, and the heat sink will be ground as well, this allows you to add extra copper for heat sink on each end. Also keep the inductor as close as possible with very large traces/pads. The recommended heat sink area is for the maximum current for the device, if you are running less that that you can get by with a little less heat sink.

RD

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