Hi guys,
Couple of days ago I was visiting TI site as usually- to see new products, new docs: new things in common for sure. And doing that I suddenly found this: 
Which is claimed to be “reference design” for boost power supply for automotive eCall system. From this moment I want to start asking some questions:
- Do you feel yourself fine placing THIS among your new and great products on main page?
- How do you thing, is that respectful to you first after doing that?
Let me comment this a bit- as a PCB designer I have some sort of mania to search really nasty board creepers all over Internet, to collect then and laugh with colleagues. In this I got significant success allover the years of doing it and can proudly say your PMP7220 can take one of the highest scores in “Really-Damn-Creepy-PCBs” chart. Yes, on it's page from TI site there is a note:”Fully assembled board (shown above) developed for testing and performance validation only, not available for sale.” But it's not the main point- main is definition if THIS as reference design. Couple quick facts:
- PCB and schematics are not equal and schematics itself isn't complete.
- a lot of generic layout issues, many of them overrides somehow your own recommendations for SMPS design.
In my opinion, putting that sort of things on main page is completely disrespectful to customers and to you- and that sort of PCB itself should be career suicide for engineer who did that.
Long story short, I've tried to forget that but couldn't- those manual shorts, soldering and footprint made my eyes bleeding for almost 2 weeks, and after realizing a fact I've started to see that creeper in my dreams next decision was to make some sort of contribution- PCB design that should look somehow adequate. I've took original schematics as it contains more components and nets compared to PCB, applied TI colors and graphics there, built IPC-7351 compliant footprints and made the layout. Final result I don't consider as “best-PCB design-ever” for some reasons, on of them is that default component selection is poor- but it's definitely better than your “E” revision of this.
I deliver this as completely non-profit contribution, in pretty generic form and with the following term in mind: “Please don't disgrace yourself, make adequate reference designs”. You got all right on it obviously and can do whatever you want.
Best Regards
Max Borisov
0511.PMP7220 Ref.F[7 Jul 2015].zip
