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Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

> - PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason. Bevel your corners. (You see examples of this on every board if you’re not sure what I mean)

If your design suffers from the consequences of this, your reach has probably exceeded your grasp. Its true that you can get noise from sharp corners, but unless you're running SPI at maximum speed, it probably won't cause any bugs in your project. And if you need to run that fast, you're going to run into other, less straightforward signal integrity problems too.

PCBs with right angle trances look ugly though. So I might still judge you for it, but only if you also wear white before Memorial Day.

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And right angle traces are more prone to delamination, which is the major reason why you want to bevel your corners.

Etching would be difficult. ie, if you bend two traces side by side with 90 degree corner, watch the etching around the corner. ie copper may be left on the inner angle of the 90-degree turn.

So, I do not use 90 degree turns for this reason, if not for the EMI reason.

Yes, the EMI thing is real but not at typical hobbyist frequency ranges. But the mechanical aspects are far, far more important and right angles are simply a bad idea. Ideally the lines are smoothly flowing (like say at the bottom of the old KIM boards), but that's not how auto routers place the traces. 45 degree angles in succession are a good enough compromise. They're mechanically reasonably strong, they don't delaminate and can be easily placed and used for bus patterns with closely spaced traces that will reliably etch without the outside being eaten up and the inside being 'too late'.

What frequency ranges does it start to become an issue? Cheap controllers can be on in the hundreds of MHz now.

>The limiting factor that will determine whether any resonances are excited is the size of the square region in a right-angle PCB trace. In particular, the lateral size of the region will be approximately equal to the quarter wavelength of the lowest order resonance, so this gives you a good baseline for estimating the fundamental resonance frequencies. The remaining harmonics will be approximately odd multiples of the fundamental frequency. If we allow a very generous trace width of 30 mils with an effective dielectric constant of 3.5, the lowest order frequency is 112 GHz! If we take this as a knee frequency for a digital signal, this is equivalent to a 3 ps rise time, which is well-below that for commercially available digital components. [0]

That whole article addresses the myths surrounding right angle traces pretty effectively.

0. https://www.nwengineeringllc.com/article/right-angle-pcb-tra...

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