“I recently did not a super complicated design – a microcontroller board – and Quilter did a fine job at rapidly finishing it. And I had the boards made, assembled, and they just worked. But the PDN looked like something a human would never have done.
There was a 1.1-volt core trace to the dual core CPU inside the microcontroller. The bypass caps were down here. Now the current version of Quilter would put the bypass caps right next to the pin, but this was before we released that capability. So they were a little further away, and the trace width was calculated based on specified maximum current that wasn’t super high. So the trace was actually reasonably narrow, about six mils. And I’m like, heck, if I measured that with a good probe, I might see a lot of bouncing around as the microcontroller’s code is executing and the load is adjusting. But, actually, everything just worked flawlessly.
And, it’s just that same old thing, like, there are things you can get away with in design. And it takes me back to all the conversations I’ve had about older tech even before PCBs when big systems are built with wire wrap. And, actually, in some cases, they worked faster and had better signal integrity because they had a point-to-point silver wire going in a straight line or as close to a straight line as it could across the back of some big board.
And it just reminded me there’s a lot you can get away with if you’re not trying to do anything too ridiculously fast or advanced. And it reminded me again that probably ninety percent of the boards that people need to make in this world aren’t cutting edge by any stretch.”
Ben Jordan in Trace Talks EP 7 on automating PCB layout