Electronic – Implications of routing same signal on top and bottom of PCB

pcb-designsignalsignal integrity

What are the implications of routing the same signal on the top and bottom of a PCB?

I have a situation where it would save me a via to do this just for about 3mm. I'm routing an I2C signal to a connector on the bottom side whilst my pull-up resistor is on the top side. Components are constrained to the top side, and there are other top-side signals that make it impractical to route the I2C signals on top.

I2C signal on top and bottom

When SDA is low, current will flow from the pull-up resistor to the connector pin and most of it (minus the slave's leakage current) will flow to ground through the master device (green trace on the PCB). Therefore the current on the top and current on the bottom will be flowing in opposite directions. Using the right-hand rule I believe the fields in the traces will cancel between the traces and everything will be peachy (i.e. EMI emissions won't compound). But my signal integrity chops aren't too sharp — am I overlooking something?

Best Answer

It is not unusual to run the same track over multiple layers to produce a high-current track. I have done this to route 100 A across a PCB.

The I2C signals do not have sharp edges and so the maximum track frequency will be relatively low. They should be fine.