Most PCBs designed today have planes for power supplies and ground returns. While most designs try and designate separate layers in the PCB stack-up for power and ground, some high density PCBs go with the idea of a split planes and sharing one physical copper layer across many different power supplies and ground returns. This idea invariably creates reference discontinuities for signals that travel across the length of the PCB making them run over many of these split planes. The straight forward result of this being the increase in return path length and loop area. And as we know, increase in loop area directly translates to increase in EMC issues. So how do we tackle this age old problem of discontinuities in return paths (referred to as “Slots”) in PCB designs without causing any major impact to cost?
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