This app note by Intel covers how to design for high speed USB. It’s full of great tips for your next project.
While mainly written for multi-layer motherboard design, we picked up tips on proper termination and routing techniques. We picked up tips on routing and placement guidelines, trace length and spacing, proper termination, plane splits, voids, and cutouts (anti-etch), as well as common routing mistakes (seen in the picture above).
a must read for anyone designing (or laying out) a board with USB. the tips aren’t all specific for USB either, other high speed differential signals require the same attention during routing. following the suggestions in this app note can make the difference between a highly reliable PCB and one that’s extremely finicky!
This is some really good stuff!
These are also great rules to live by if you’re designing high-frequency radio boards. I’ve used them to build several successful > 1 GHz boards. Though using four-layer circuit boards (via Laen’s Dorkbot PDX board order service) was probably the single most important factor in those successes…
A similar document from Texas Instruments is named SPRAAR7 (in their obscure document-naming scheme), and can be found at http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/litabsmultiplefilelist.tsp?literatureNumber=spraar7
Um, the human-readable title of that TI document is “USB 2.0 Board Design and Layout Guidelines”