Ground in PCB Layout - Separate or Not Separate? (with Rick Hartley)

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Recommends electrophile · 2021-04 · Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange · on “Ground plane layout for noise suppression/immunity”

I have 7 x A3941 DC motor drivers and they have to coexist on a board with an STM32 MCU and onboard 5V and 3.3V supplies. Since there are a lot of ‘noisy’ components here, will the following ground plane layout be valid for noise immunity/suppression? The quiet ground is essentially a plane for a few components as per the recommendation in the A3941 datasheet. [LINK] EDIT: The current placement layout is as follows, [LINK] EDIT-2: Came across this wonderful video [this video] a day ago on splitting ground planes and if you should do so. A real eye opener for me.

Recommends OWC · 2022-06 · Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange · on “Split ground or continuous ground”

Unfortunately there is no simple answer tho this question. The best answer I can give, is to watch a recent video from Robert Feranec interviewing Rick Hartley about the complexity of PCB designs and grounding in particular. [this video] Although this is about very high speed board designs, the same principles still apply. In general it's better to have a solid ground but keep all the sensitive parts very well contained. Use adequate decoupling caps, and enough stitching with vias. In this case there is also high voltage on the board, so please be VERY sure to keep proper creepage and clearance distances, also with respect to ground! As well as standard isolation safety.

Recommends RogerAF · 2024-02 · Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange · on “How to create an analog power source?”

First of all the AD9833 doesn't require an "Analog Power Supply" it just has both an Analog and a Digital ground pin, for PCBs that separate the ground planes. You don't have to worry about it. If you want to avoid switching noise in the PSU you can have a linear LDO regulator supplying VDD to the AD9833. I believe I tried to use this chip back in 2010 and could not get it to perform as advertised. I spent many hours on the phone to tech support at ADI with a result of "maybe our chip doesn't work" being the final word. Perhaps you'll have better luck. Of further note, the digital "Word" that determines frequency is not a linear progression. By which I mean that if you instantiate a counter

Cites GNA · 2021-10 · Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange · on “Looking for a high-perfomance MCU for my thesis. The idea is to programme a digital processor that emulates tube amps in the best way possible”

I've read papers that used the PSoC 5LP but the writers felt their hands tied by the limitations of the board You'll probably be fine with any "higher end" ARM MCU. Audio processing is not trivial but it's not super high speed either. I you want to use floating point math (fixed point math is probably sufficient but not as convenient), I would highly recommend using a microcontroller with an integrated floating point unit (FPU) e.g Cortex-M4 / Cortex-M7 based ARM controllers. Since I have limited time to write my thesis it would be very important for the MCU I'm using to have built-in ADCs and DACs (16-bit each, preferably) IMHO, this is not a very good idea. The ADCs/DACs are the most impor

Cites BenK · 2024-06 · Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange · on “Ground plane for SMPS EMI-Filter?”

I am designing a board including various switch mode power supplies, e.g. Buck, boost, and so on. The application notes recommend using split ground planes for power and analog parts, however after some research (e.g. Rick Hartley's video [this video] about grounding) I decided to just use a single ground plane and try to seperate the power components and analog components as much as possible. One remaining question I have is about the usage of ground planes when designing an EMI filter. I've read somewhere that you should cut out the ground plane beneath the EMI filter and all inductors to reduce noise coupling. Is this necessary?