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Should I jumper one power trace or multiple signal traces

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mik3ca

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I'm making a complex single-sided circuit board which cannot be routed successfully without the use of jumper wires. I use staples as my jumper wires and they work well.

Until now, I always thought to never break power lines. I try to use a ground plane where possible, but my question more lies on the VCC (+5VDC) line.

I have a circuit in which the VCC line is 40mils in width and about say 10 inches long when flattened out. After watching eagle struggling in autorouting mode, it seems my choices are:

1. take signal traces that need to cross the power and add a jumper to every one of them.
2. Just jumper the power line.

If my question is confusing, this image should help you understand. Pretend the boxes with ABC are integrated circuits each with pins named A, B, and C. The orange lines are signal traces on the PCB and the red is the VCC line I was talking about earlier.

circuit.png



Which is the best? Also, for the signals, many of them will change state every approximately 500ns. There are a very few that will change state much faster than that, and theres a few that change state very slowly (under once a second).
 
I'd jumper the power lines and make sure you have adequate decoupling at each chip.

Mike.
 
Ok, I do have 0.047uF caps as close to each chip as possible. Now if I do power coupling, how thick should the jumper be? I just think if I do a super thin jumper, then not enough power will be delivered to the circuit?
 
As long as you caps are ceramic then you should be fine. Assuming the chips aren't power hungry then almost any wire would do.

Mike.
 
I would jumper the one power instead off the three small ones unless I was using a PCB with nice neat, but small SMD jumpers which can't jump over more than one trace.

Even 22AWG can carry 8A, much heavier than most power traces. You'll be fine.
 
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