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by emberdaway 2139 days ago
And the PCB has 10 layers! They must have had fun designing it.
1 comments

Kinda does beg the question whether ten layers were really necessary, but I'm not a board designer.
I see a pretty fine-pitch BGA on there, so I'm guessing it is (but also not a designer)
BGA isn’t usually the reason for 10 layers, it’s high speed signals like SDRAM that need isolation and timing.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you're dead on.

I just finished routing an LPDDR4 bus (high speed + low voltage => worst case signal integrity) between two BGAs with signals routed on only 3 layers. The catch is that you need each high speed bus to be comfortably sandwiched between solid copper planes. Layers dedicated to reference planes start to add up quite quickly when you've got RAM, eMMC, ethernet, wifi, camera input, display output, SD card, etc all crossing over and through each other.