Design Tips For High-Pin Count Devices In PCB Layouts

The electronic industry continues to evolve and the common modern circuit designs include the high-pin count devices like FPGAs, microprocessors, and advanced ASICs. These components offer excellent performance capabilities tremendously by combining them into a printed circuit board or PCB layout offering significant challenges. However, managing hundreds of pins without compromising the signal integrity, power distribution, or manufacturability requires accurate planning and strategic layout. 

On the other hand with high-pin count the PCB designs become denser and more complex paving way for numerous errors. Designers must consider various while designing high-pin count including the impedance control, trace length matching, thermal management, and layer stack-up. Hence, this blog explores primary design tips for the high-pin count devices in the PCB layout ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and manufacturability. 

Fan-Out Strategy:

The BGA or Ball Grid Array chip in the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) has 1000 pins which works on surface-mount packaging technology connecting the components on the board. One of the errors that a PCB designer can make is to drill deep holes right into the board that are too near the edge of the chip. This can totally disturb the entire design significantly. Hence, it is ideal to use the top few layers of the PCB to guide or fan-out the pins from the chip. Thus, start by placing the pins at the outmost pins and connect them right on the top layer just to get them away from the chip area. In case, there is enough space then you can do the same with the same row of pins.But if the pins are too close together (like with a very tight 0.4 mm spacing), then it’s better to send those signals to the next layer underneath, even if that layer is normally used for grounding.

Layer Management And Routing Methods

Traditionally, it’s advised to run traces (wires on the PCB) at right angles to those on the layer directly above or below. But in practice, especially near the edges of a chip with lots of pins (called a “pin field”), this doesn’t really work. Instead, you need to route the traces outward from the center of the chip. Once the traces are far enough away from the chip, you can then connect them to other components or to a via (a tiny hole that lets you connect different layers of the board). At that point, you can start following the usual rule of routing in specific directions on each layer.

Power And Ground Distribution

The high pin count components have many pins in the center which are used for power and ground connections. Hence, it is important to have enough copper in these areas to manage the electrical current safety. Therefore, it becomes important to use the broader pathways or the solid copper area to enhance more power across the board efficiently. In addition, by adding more connection points which are called vias for the power and ground connection helps in reducing the resistance and makes the design more stable and reliable. 

Making Repairs Easier On Complex PCBs

It is a wise solution to leave some space around the big and complicated components while designing a PCB. This space helps the technicians to remove or replace the components if needed. In case there is no space, the nearby parts should be removed first which takes more effort and time. Hence, placing components in the right spots helps with repairs and improves the efficiency of the boards.

Using Advanced PCB Design Software

The modern PCB tools which includes the Or CAD X offers robust features to assist with the complex designs. These tools help in checking the working of the system in real time, manage the design rules, and make it easier to route the connections between the pins. Hence, by using the advanced PCB design software it is much easier and manageable to design PCB with lots of pins.

Designing PCBs with high-pin-count components takes careful planning. You need to think about how the signals spread out from each pin (fan-out), how to use the layers of the board wisely, and how to distribute power evenly. You also need to think about repairs when placing components. Using advanced design software and following the latest best practices we at Sunstream offer PCB layout services to handle your designs with any form of challenges. We stay with the industry trends by enhancing our design skills ensuring to stay ahead in this field.