Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Elementary Mr. Watson: Routing Hunger Games—May the Traces Be Ever in Your Favor

I’d like to share a harsh truth, and I say this as a friend: PCB designers are often their own worst enemy. It’s rarely the complexity of the circuit, the last-minute changes from mechanical, the limited enclosure space, or the ever-expanding list of design rules that send projects to the dust heap of failed boards. More often, it's our own decisions, made too quickly and narrowly, and with too little foresight, that sabotage an otherwise good design. The tragedy is that these decisions usually happen early during placement and layout, when the foundation of everything else is being set. That’s when the snowball begins.

Instead of thinking long-term, we think, “Get the parts on the board.” That’s how shortsightedness creeps in. Designers rush to place components to feel productive. They ignore signal flow in favor of aesthetics. They assume the routing will somehow work itself out. In the moment, it feels like progress, but you’ve created a time bomb set to explode during routing, testing, or manufacturing.

These problems don’t stem from a lack of talent or knowledge, but from not giving ourselves the time and discipline to think ahead, so we get in our own way. We check the boxes—the schematic is done, we’ve imported the parts—and we start building the house without laying the foundation. Every component placed without a plan is a trap waiting to be sprung. That’s why we’ve spent this past month diving into one of the most underappreciated but critical parts of the design process: floor planning. It’s not optional. It’s not a sketch or a suggestion. It’s the strategic phase that determines the success of everything that follows. You define the board outline, establish mechanical boundaries, identify functional zones (power, analog, digital, RF), and align major components based on signal flow, return paths, and thermal management. This is where you consider connector orientation, test-point access, power entry, and future expansion. It’s where engineering meets foresight.

In PCB design without floor planning,  everything connects, but nothing makes sense. It’s uncomfortable, inefficient, and, frankly, gross. Why would you build a circuit board that way? When that chaotic layout hits the routing stage, that’s when we enter what I like to call…

The Routing Hunger Games 
Twelve nets enter. One trace survives the via gauntlet. It’s a dark place where every signal becomes a tribute, not chosen by lottery, but condemned by poor planning. Once you place components without a strategy, you seal the arena. From that moment, each net must fight its way through a maze of mismatched layers, broken planes, and congested routing channels crafted by the hand that built it: the designer. In this arena, return currents wander unprotected because fractured power and ground planes resemble the broken districts of Panem. Critical signals—USB pairs, high-speed clocks, differential traces—become separated, ripped from their companions, and scattered across multiple layers. They’re forced to cross split planes, jump through vias, and navigate thermally unstable zones like a tribute dodging fireballs and mutant wasps.

Then come the vias, the arena’s desperate escape hatches. Like hidden traps or last-chance lifelines, they offer a way out, but at a price. Each adds parasitic inductance, impedance shifts, and reliability risks. Use too many, and your board becomes a minefield of performance problems. Use too few, and your signals die alone in a dead-end corridor.

This isn’t logical design. It’s routing by survival; an act of desperation, not discipline. Like the Capitol in “The Hunger Games,” the DRC engine watches your every move, ready to punish violations, expose flaws, and flag failures. There are no real victors here, only designers who crawl across the finish line and call it done. If you survive, EMI testing is waiting in the sequel.

Our Decisions Have Consequences
PCB design is a chain of cause and effect. The board doesn’t forget. Every shortcut you take, every “good enough for now” decision, every moment you skip the plan to “just keep moving,” they return. Maybe during routing or fabrication. Maybe in the hands of the customer. Skipping the floor plan might feel like a productivity hack: You’re placing parts like a legend. Routing will be a breeze, right? Not exactly. Routing becomes a tangled spaghetti of signals, a jungle of vias, and a graveyard of broken return paths. EMI throws a party. Differential pairs ghost each other like a bad breakup. Your router? It's crying quietly in the corner. It’s like building a freeway with no exits, or decorating your living room by dumping all the furniture in the middle and calling it “minimalist.” It’s not. It’s chaos with a silkscreen.

In short, you can design fast, or you can design smart, but you can’t do both without a plan. Floor planning is the strategy that keeps your board (and your sanity) intact. So plan. Your future self and every net you’ve ever laid will thank you.

John Watson is a professor at Palomar College, San Marcos, California.