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20 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2025 chess prodigy understand how to see the whole game. Kingsley's character clears all the pieces off the chessboard during a lesson, leaving it empty. He does this to show that sometimes, when you're stuck or can't find the right move, you must take a step back and look at the situation without all the distractions. By clearing the board, he helps the boy see the bigger picture, when all the pieces before had cluttered his mind, and he now finds the hidden solution. is is the "Bobby Fischer Trick." is moment teaches that sometimes simplifying and focusing on the essentials can unlock the best moves in chess and life. at also goes for your component placement and what will become your routing. Use the Bobby Fischer Trick in your PCB design: Clear your board, much like you would a chessboard. When you turn off everything on your PCB design except the rat's nest, you see a web of thin lines connecting pins all over the board. ese lines show all the electrical con- nections that you need to route. Looking at this messy tangle, you can spot problems immedi- ately: long lines stretching across the board and many lines crossing each other. Long lines can cause signal delays or interference, and crossed lines mean traces will have to jump over each other using vias or complicated routing paths. is view helps designers understand where routing will be most challenging and shows which areas need better component placement or special attention during routing. It's like see- ing the puzzle pieces before you start putting them together, helping you plan how to make the connections clean and efficient. e quality of your routing is only as strong as the thought- fulness of your placement; every smooth con- nection begins with smart decisions. e layer stackup is one of the most essential parts of solving the puzzle, having good rout- ing, and a successful PCB design. It defines how the layers in the board are arranged: where the signal layers are placed, where the power and ground planes go, and how everything works together to support the routing. A well-planned stackup makes rout- ing easier, cleaner, and more reliable. One of the key con- nections between the stackup and routing is the use of layer pairs, which in this case refers to pairs of signal layers used to manage routing directions. Designers oen plan these signal layer pairs so that one handles traces going hori- zontally, or East and West, and the other han- dles traces going vertically, North and South. ese routing strategies help reduce the pos- sibility of routing congestion and make it eas- ier to route escape pins on complex parts like BGAs (which will be discussed on another day). Following such a strict rule results in your PCB design developing routing channels. For example, in a six-layer board, the layer pairs you have decided on are that layer 1 is paired with layer 6. Layer one will go North and South, and layer six will go East and West. ese two layers become a routing pair that supports efficient signal flow. One solid practice I should mention here is that each signal layer in the stackup should sit next to a solid reference plane, usually a ground or power plane. at ensures every trace has a clean return path, essential for signal integrity and noise control. is type of pairing—sig- nal next to plane—is essential for maintaining impedance and reducing EMI. e stackup also affects how and when vias are used during routing. Vias connect traces between different