Ground Plane..

[hammerheadmusicman]

A little while ago, i remember someone saying something about R.G Keen having recommended against the use of ground planes. Does any one remember this, or have a link to it? Or if you have any views on the pros and cons of using a ground plane when designing a board layout, please feel free to share, i'd be very interested to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter!


George

[hammerheadmusicman]

Information from clever people bump..

[RobA]

I haven't read Keen's article, so I don't know his reasoning. There are potential issues with using a ground plane and how current flows through it and the influence of the other layers' traces on this flow. Given that there are tons of guitar effects out there that work fine without a ground plane, I can see there could be an argument against using them everywhere.

But, with certain parts, specifically digital parts, the spec sheets specify use of ground planes and they are very much needed. There's a section in The Art of Electronics where they are talking about the use of ground planes and use the words "... skimpy grounds are certain invitations to disaster ..." They are talking about digital circuits and specifically about memory subsystems. But, the same kind of ideas apply to other digital/clocked circuits. If you look up the specs sheets and application notes for CODEC, ADC , and DAC parts, particularly those with separated analog and digital grounds, they'll talk about what the ground plane needs to be like at the tie point for the AGND and DGND and why it needs to be there.