10.1 Layout Guidelines

Layout is a critical portion of good power supply design. There are several signal paths that conduct fast changing currents or voltages that can interact with stray inductance or parasitic capacitance to generate noise or degrade the power supplies performance. Care should be taken to minimize the loop area formed by the bypass capacitor connections and the VIN pins. See Figure 54 for a PCB layout example. The GND pins and AGND pin should be tied directly to the power pad under the IC. The power pad should be connected to any internal PCB ground planes using multiple vias directly under the IC. Additional vias can be used to connect the top side ground area to the internal planes near the input and output capacitors. For operation at full rated load, the top side ground area along with any additional internal ground planes must provide adequate heat dissipating area.

Locate the input bypass capacitor as close to the IC as possible. The PH pin should be routed to the output inductor. Since the PH connection is the switching node, the output inductor should be located very close to the PH pins, and the area of the PCB conductor minimized to prevent excessive capacitive coupling. The boot capacitor must also be located close to the device. The sensitive analog ground connections for the feedback voltage divider, compensation components, slow start capacitor and frequency set resistor should be connected to a separate analog ground trace as shown. The RT/CLK pin is particularly sensitive to noise so the RT resistor should be located as close as possible to the IC and routed with minimal lengths of trace. The additional external components can be placed approximately as shown. It may be possible to obtain acceptable performance with alternate PCB layouts, however this layout has been shown to produce good results and is meant as a guideline.