questions regarding vias

Expensive for small holes (100MHz).

We have a board with 0.2mm holes and 0.2mm rings. But many rings and traces come out and the boards are trashed.

Nope, but educated by the board makers with costs (very expensive to find out why boards are difficult to make and test).

Ditto.

(snip) When I pass significant current through a via (in contrast to to a signal voltage) I often up size the hole to lower the resistance of the via. I ask advice on such matters from the company producing the boards, or just guess. It depends on the board cost and volume (in other words, the risk of failure).

I think there is also quite a bit of process variation from one vendor to another. Sometimes I am not worried about temperature rise as much as voltage drop. But that case is sometimes cured with a two trace approach, a big one to carry current and a small one to measure voltage at the beginning of the trace.

Vias are always an annoyance to me. Having no formal training in PCB layout, I'm always a little confused regarding them. Hopefully somebody here can help me out.

First of all - I was wondering - how bad are vias? I mean I understand it's best to avoid them - but why? Production costs? Or do they add a significatn amount of capacitance or resistance to a trace? Most of the stuff I work at runs at about 5Mhz or under - at that speed should I be worrying about vias?

Second of all - vias drill size and pad diameters always confused me. I've just been doing the smallest drill my board maker can do (about .4mm diameter) with a default pad size, which Cadsoft's Eagle has be double the drill (so .8mm). Is it really necessary for this pad to be so large? It makes layout with vias a bit of a nuisance.

On a side note - did anybody here actually get formal training in PCB layout? I'm a 3rd year EE at UIUC and I have yet to see any PCB layout course, so I've been left wondering where people pick up this skill.

Thanks for your help,

-Mike

I used to lay out with tape and peel-and-stick footprints, and one major reason to avoid vias is so you don't have to keep flipping that damn mylar over! And one major way to avoid (standalone) vias is to use the holes that are there anyway for components. :-)

As far as advice, look at how other people do it. Do as short and direct of power and ground as possible, and capacitate them well. Then, find the most direct paths, and use pencil. ;-) There used to be red and blue pencils, to do top and bottom on your paper layout - I guess these days the kids use computers to do that stuff. ;-)

Good Luck! Rich

All voltages are between two points, not just one! My favourite subject to rant about is "earth" or "ground" which people take for granted for the same reason. Let's see now, Mr Customer, we have

input signal ground output signal ground local circuit reference power return(s) RF ground (local) safety earth chassis ground plane IC/HF current return

which one were you measuring "12V" with respect to?

Well, one way to look at it is this. The signal travels at ~ c/2 so it takes ~10ps to traverse a via. With a impedance mismatch ~ 100%, you're only going to get significant reflections on edges with that sort of rise time. Or sine waves >> 1GHz.

You could also reckon on a mm or two of track having an inductance of point something nH, which immediately gives you the same time constant with a normal track impedance ~70.

I do sympathise but you'll find it if you look, it's just that it will be in dribs and drabs as different people write from different perspectives.

Michael Noone wrote: (snip)

I did not receive it.

Things change in the PCB industry. many companies will give you unlimited vias at no extra cost. Vias used to be less reliable than solid copper traces but that's not an issue now.

Of course a via does create a discontinuity in the transmission line but if you don't know about this then you probably don't know (and don't need to know) about other things that affect HF design.

Your PCB vender will have design rules, typically .15mm for the copper width around a via, so you are fairly close to a standard size. However, it doesn't cost too much to go to 3 thou geometry, that's ..075mm, but in that case you'll be looking at .3mm holes or less.

Practice.

It's also important to find out about trace thicknesses for current capacity, layout considerations for EMC, good grounding techniques to minimize noise, the concept of current loops andf decoupling, different SMT footprints for different soldering methods, safety clearances etc. Fortunately all of these things are published on the Web.

There are actually tables for the current carrying capacity of vias. I can't recall the URL, but you can be sure it was only two clicks away from Google. You have to pull an acceptable temperature rise out of the air: some people panic over 5 degrees, others have a robust approach which regards 100 degrees as barely getting started :)

John Popelish wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@adelphia.com:

That is very odd - It didn't bounce or anything. I'm not sure what happened. I just resent my previous e-mail. Can you confirm if you recieve it? Thanks again,

-Mike

Working with signals that are an order of magnitude faster (30-50MHz), I still don't worry about them.

Working at /TWO/ orders of magnitude higher, I've had to characterize vias in terms of their effect on the stability of a canned RF transmitter IC, and it does have a significant effect there.

I use AC all the time - my preferred PCB vendor.

Looks like your minimum is very roughly 0.68mm outer diameter.

#define RANT

Jeez, you expected useful stuff to be taught at school? It would be a fundamental departure from college policies dating back several thousand years. A BSEE these days wastes twelve credits on Java programming. Sixteen credits are mathematics but half of this should have been taught in high school (and is, in other countries - US schools are too busy teaching that the world was created in seven days by God^H^H^Hperson or persons unknown, holding meetings to make sure that "students" are not singing Christmas carols). Credits wasted on liberal arts (exactly how is African-American history going to help you solve engineering problems?). Etc, etc.

#undef RANT

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Well production costs on my board are a non-issue, so it sounds like I probabaly don't have to worry too much about overusage of vias.

I'm using Advanced Circuits, they say

33each1.asp):

Min. 0.006" line/space Min. 0.015" hole size

hence the .4mm drill (.015" = .381mm). .006" is .1524mm, so you think the ..2mm extra radius probabaly is pretty much unavoidable, right?

It'd odd that schools don't offer it - seems like an oversight to me as PCB layout is fairly important.

-Mike

John Popelish wrote in news:vpednTCgK7UVP1PenZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@adelphia.com:

That's what I normally try to do. I normally try to have the diameter of the drill not too much smaller than the trace width, though by my intuition I'd think that you could get away with having the diameter a third of the trace width and still be golden (being that circumference is pi * d). By the way, did you recieve the updated layout that I sent you, and did you have any time to take a look at it? Thanks,

-Mike

Derek Potter wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

My board company is like this.

I'm all too familiar with transmission lines (having just taken a class on them) - but I was unsure if information from that class would be pertinent to fairly low speed (5mhz) applications

Unfortunately my board maker limites to just under .4mm holes.

This is what I've been attempting to learn over the past couple of weeks, but my classes have been nearly useless in this regard and I have yet to find any good resources on the web.

-Mike

When designing Infiniband boards (signalling rate up to 5Gb/s, depending on board), I had diff pairs (well, of course). It took some working out, but I made a calculator for my diff vias with sig gnd vias as a 4-inline set (gnd, sig, sig, gnd) so that the transition into the via was my only real discontinuity. The signal in the via (which is a significant distance with tr ~ 50ps) is actually in a transmission line (broadside coupled stripline, effectively).

That was very effective in reducing my losses going from chip to connector, and chip to chip, to say nothing of helping EMC issues.

General rule of thumb for most board fabs is drill >= board thickness /

8, although you can get smaller (thickness / 10) if you are willing to accept lower yield (higher cost). The problem is the drill bits break quite frequently when the dia/depth ratio gets low. Certainly my mfrs would ask me if I really really needed vias 'that small'. For multilayer boards (significant number of layers - 8 or more, perhaps) with small annuli and small drills, registration becomes a problem for some mfrs as well.

I sympathise as well. One might think that after all these years of 'learning by experience' [i.e. learning from our mistakes] there aren't more resources to help others avoid those same mistakes. I'll be the first to admit good layout staff are difficult to come by.

Cheers

PeteS