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I have the following board design in mind:

enter image description here

It's a 4 layer, ~5cm diameter board where 10 slave PCB's will be soldered to it that are connected over the I2C bus. The trace line you see is roughly 8 cm in length. This bus has the clock going over the top layer and the data bus over the bottom layer, but I could always change that.

I could also route the traces over 1 layer but use via's to cross each other at the end points, if that makes sense.

As far as I can tell I'm not doing something that is against any I2C "rules" bus I'm also not that familiar with this sort of setup.

The end-point devices will add roughly 150-200 pF total load capacitance to the bus, excluding trace, solder joint and via capacitance. Which as far as I could tell is not a problem since it's far lower than 400 pF already. The bus will be running on 400 kHz.

What method of routing would be recommended here? Am I accidentally designing a radio receiver or worse, a transmitter?

edit: I forgot a case where both are routed on the top layer; Should I match the amount of vias used on both lines even if those vias aren't strictly needed?

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Looks fine to me. You could split it in two at the middle and go both ways (don't join them at the far end) but I don't think it's very important for only 80mm total length.

Make sure you have pullup resistors commensurate with your capacitive loading and drive capability of the weakest chip.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I know I shouldn't join them at the ends, but for completeness sake, why exactly? \$\endgroup\$
    – Tryphon
    Commented Dec 17, 2018 at 16:05
  • \$\begingroup\$ I actually don't think it will make much difference, the return path is the ground plane, but it won't help. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Dec 17, 2018 at 16:09

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