Electronics Design AU
PCB DesignSolved

Best 4-layer stack-up for a board with both analog and digital circuitry?

2 min read2 replies
Original Question

Asked by soggy_waffle42 ·

Spinning up a board with an STM32 doing the digital side and a precision analog front end (instrumentation amp into an ADC) reading a low-level sensor signal. Going 4-layer. Old habit from a previous job was always split the ground plane — separate analog and digital ground, join them at one point near the ADC. Is that still the right call, or has guidance moved on since I last had to think about this seriously.

Planning signal/ground/power/signal as the base stack-up, just unsure about the split.

From the knowledge baseWhat Is a PCB Stack-Up, and How Do You Design One?

2 Replies

grumpy_otter7
Accepted Answer

Signal/ground/power/signal is the right starting stack-up, no notes there. The split ground habit, though — that's the one piece of received wisdom from a decade-plus ago that's actually aged badly for most boards, including yours.

Current best practice is a single, solid, unbroken ground plane, with the analog/digital separation handled by component placement and routing discipline instead of a physical split. Reason: the moment any signal needs to cross from the digital side to the analog side (and on a board with an ADC, something always does), that signal's return current either has to detour around the split — adding loop inductance and often radiating more, not less — or you end up needing a stitching capacitor across the split anyway, which mostly defeats the point of splitting it in the first place.

What actually works: keep the ADC and analog front end physically grouped on one side of the board, route the digital bus and clock lines away from that area, and let the solid ground plane do its job underneath both sections. One thing that is worth doing deliberately: route the connection between analog and digital sections (your ADC interface) through a single, narrow corridor rather than letting digital traces sprawl close to the analog section from multiple directions. See our PCB power and ground plane design guide for the full reasoning on why solid planes generally beat splits.

quietkettle99

Agree with the solid-plane recommendation as the default, and it's worth being precise about why, since "never split a ground plane" gets repeated as an absolute rule more often than the underlying reasoning is actually explained.

The case against splitting specifically concerns signals that need to cross the split while still being referenced to the same ground — that's where the return-path penalty applies, and it's almost always worse than the coupling it was meant to prevent. That's different from a board with genuine galvanic isolation between sections (an isolated power supply, a mains-referenced stage, a digital isolator barrier), where there is no signal meant to cross at all, and a deliberate split enforced by the isolation component itself is correct and necessary — not the same situation as a single-ground-domain instrumentation circuit like this one.

For your specific board, solid plane is right. I'd just push back gently on framing "never split" as a universal law rather than "don't split within a single ground domain" — worth knowing the distinction for the next board that does involve genuine isolation.

Related Discussions