On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 11:35:17PM -0400, William Donzelli wrote:
   With both
sides in play, that seems likely, but a 12"x12" board is going
 to be pricy (at least there won't be many through-holes, just vias; those
 things add up). 
 Exactly. I think a six layer board would be needed, but maybe with some
 extremely optimized routing, maybe a four layer. Either way, I doubt there
 would be a whole bunch of unused real estate left (or money in your
 pocket). 
 
One could always trade-off between a larger, emptier board and fewer layers.
I haven't priced multi-layer boards in a while, but we used to use 6-layer
boards for Qbus and Unibus designs... ground, Vcc, 2 sets of horizontal and
two sets of vertical traces to avoid routing problems, but that was with a
100% thru-hole design.  VAXBI boards were crazier with 10 layers (mandated
by DEC) - the additional layers tended towards the diagonals, also to
solve routing issues with dense thru-hole designs.
An SMT transistorized machine would be an interesting project, but hell to
debug I would imagine.
-ethan
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