There are three GND pins on the Arduino UNO pinout. As I'm trying to design a mixed signal PCB to act as an Arduino Shield, I wonder how I should connect those pins, i.e. to the analog or digital ground plane? Or can I assume the left pin row is digital (thus on digital ground) and the right analog (next to the analog inputs, on analog ground)?
Arduino Ground reference plane
arduinoground-planegroundingpcb-design
Related Solutions
Sorry, my bad. I posted this image from the CY8C32 datasheet into my answer to the other question:
but didn't copy the caption. "Figure 2-8. Example PCB Layout for 100-pin TQFP Part for Optimal Analog Performance". This is for the TQFP100 part, which doesn't have the thermal pad, and doesn't apply to the QFN48 you're using.
For parts with a thermal pad the split makes no sense, and you should connect the thermal pad to digital ground.
The center pad on the QFN package should be connected to digital ground (VSSD) for best mechanical, thermal, and electrical performance. If not connected to ground, it should be electrically floated and not connected to any other signal. (page 6)
Note that when you use a thermal pad on your PCB that you shouldn't apply solder paste all over it, but use a windowed stencil to avoid the IC being pushed up by the solder paste:
"The solder paste pattern area should cover 35 % of the solder land area. When printing solder paste on the exposed die pad solder land, the solder paste dot area should cover no more than 20 % of this solder land area. Furthermore, the paste should be printed away from the solder land edges. This is illustrated in Figure 9; the solder paste pattern area lies within the boundary indicated by the red line and it is divided by the entire solder land area." (from here)
Further reading
CY8C32 datasheet
HVQFN application information, NXP application note
In general, the point of separating ground planes is to reduce the influence of any noisy components on the noise-sensitive ones. Thus, the voltage regulators and primary micro circuitry should use the normal ground, and the micro analog, amplifier, amplifier decoupling capacitor and voltage divider resistors should use the analog ground. This is what you have already illustrated. (Note that the passive components in the analog portion can introduce noise as well, but there is little you can do to avoid that, since grounding them to the general plane will just couple in even more noise.)
Another strategy that is often used for noise reduction is to group and separate the noisy components from the sensitive ones. This could be as simple as placing the power components on one side of the micro, and the amplifier and friends on the other side. Make sure the routing is direct and as short as possible, and decrease the impedance by increasing trace widths or copper weight wherever possible. Note that this can be used independently of, or along with, the separate ground planes.
This e2v application note is a very good place to start when laying out out a mixed signal board.
Related Topic
- Ground type for DC regulator
- Electronic – arduino – Proper PCB grounding with several general purpose ICs
- Electronic – Board structure relative to ground plane
- Electronic – Avoiding noise coupling by power switching to ground plane in multilayer PCB
- Electronic – Should I really divide the ground plane into analog and digital parts
- Electronic – What’s the best ground topology for this mixed signal board
- Electronic – Potential Difference in the Ground plane
Best Answer
Those three grounds are all tied together on the Arduino. If you want to have separate grounds for analog and digital, don't tie them both to the Arduino. Maybe tie the digital ground to the Arduino ground and AC couple the output from your analog circuit so it has it's own independent ground.