Power/ground and layers - best practice

[patricks]

Hi everyone,
I'm new to Diptrace and have been working my way through my first schematic capture and board design. I'm wondering what is best practice for layers with a circuit with multiple voltages? My circuit has 9V/PWR and GND, plus a +18V supply from a voltage doubler and VRef (also 9V) for biasing some op amps and jfets.
Currently I have internal plane layers set up for all of these, with copper pours to connect to the relevant supplies. This turns it into a six-layer board, which gets kind of pricey for prototyping, so is it good practice to have each supply with its own plane layer and end up with multiple layers, or is it OK to just have PWR and GND as planes and not for the other supply voltages?
Thanks heaps
Pat

[Tomg]

Robert Feranec has a PCB design website full of informative videos. Here are some links that may help answer some of your questions...

Layer Ordering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60RxCiZuD9E

Ground Layers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vALt6Sd9vlY

Robert Feranec videos selection page: https://www.youtube.com/@RobertFeranec/videos

[patricks]

Great, thank you! I'll check them out

[fastbike]

I have some boards with 24, 12, 5, and 3.3v. I place the 24 on the top layer with signals on the top and bottom, layer 2 is GND and layer 3 is the 5v and 3v3.

Capture.PNG (59.77 KiB) Viewed 4311 times

[patricks]

Nice, thanks very much!

[dostr63]

Thanks - Tomg - that second video on split ground planes was especially useful.
(I'm pleased to say I got it right - but perhaps more luck/intuition than deep understanding!)

[patricks]

Thanks everyone!
I ended up going with a two-layer board without planes, trying to arrange components to keep power traces as short as possible, and with traces horizontal on the top layer and vertical on the bottom layer, trying to minimise signal and signal/power interaction.
The prototypes are due to arrive this week, we'll see how it works when I put it together