Ball grid array devices are, without question, an increasingly important aspect of printed circuit board design. While their benefits are numerous, they present the unique challenge of requiring an enormous amount of traces to originate in a small area underneath a device and then go all over the board without crossing traces. The most challenging aspect is getting those traces out from underneath the board, a process called creating a breakout or fanout. In the breakout, these traces are said to escape from underneath the board and come to the outside where they are more accessible. A poorly designed breakout can be overcome by increasing the layer count on a PCB but that increases the cost and complexity. There are number of different scenarios that would require different approaches to breaking out the races, however, due to limitations in space, only the more common concepts and methods will be discussed here.
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