SLVAE87A December 2020 – October 2023 BQ79600-Q1 , BQ79612-Q1 , BQ79614-Q1 , BQ79616-Q1 , BQ79652-Q1 , BQ79654-Q1 , BQ79656-Q1
It is very important to establish a clean grounding scheme to ensure best performance of the device. There are 3 ground pins (AVSS, DVSS, CVSS) for the device’s internal power supplies and 1 ground reference (REFHM) for the precision reference. There are noisy grounds and quiet grounds that shall be separated in the layout initially and re-joint together in a lower PCB layer. The external components (e.g. bypass capacitors) shall be tied to the proper grounding group if possible to keep the separation of noisy and quiet grounds apart.
Even on a PCB layer that is mainly for signal routing, it is good practice to have as small an island of ground pour as possible to provide a low impedance ground, rather than simply via down the ground trace to an lower ground plane.
There is a strong recommendation to have a minimum of four layers in the PCB, with one fully dedicated as an unbroken VSS plane (except thermal reliefs). Avoid placing tracks on this layer to maintain the unbroken integrity of the plane structure.
If multiple devices are placed on the same PCB, each device should have its own ground plane with proper layout clearance.