Ground Design and Power Supply for a WiFi Transceiver
Without some knowledge of the fundamentals of grounding, board stack up and supply routing, you cannot hope to make a good RF layout.
If you want a really good RF layout and if you want to maximize the performance of an RF design, you should know additional details about supply bypassing, power supply routing and grounding.
Usually what happens is, when an embedded engineer is designing an RF circuit design, the high frequency signal path becomes the main consideration and the power supply layout and implementation becomes an afterthought.
This can cause the supply voltages going around the circuit to become noisy and corrupted, bringing down the performance of the RF circuitry.
You can prevent this by planning the PCB layer stack up properly, using a star topology to route the VCC and decoupling the VCC pins properly. Another way to make the circuit more efficient is by creating a sensible PCB layer.
Don’t impose a large power plane on the VCC signals because that would degrade the system performance. A better option is to use a custom power supply. This can be aided by employing a star topology for the supply voltage. This will prevent coupling between supply pins.
