I am currently laying out the board for an audio amplifier I am working on. The power requirements aren't very high – there won't be much more than 500mA flowing through any given trace. However, I have ample space on my board, so I was thinking about using wide rectangular fills (40-50mil wide), like the following:
Having wider traces minimizes resistance, an in addition to being much wider than they need to be, I find a layout like this to be aesthetically pleasing. However, could any issues arise from routing like this instead of using thinner traces? In other words, is there a reason why I should only make traces as wide as they need to be?
Best Answer
Usually that's just fine.
The parasitic capacitance to your ground plane will be a lot higher. In many cases that won't cause any problems (and may be better in the case of supply rails) but occasionally it can cause issues such as oscillation.
It can also cause excessive unwanted coupling affecting whatever is on the other side of the PCB if the voltage changes quickly on the trace.