i am not sure if this is the right place to ask, but i hope someone can help me. I am trying to make a PCB for one of my projects using DesignSpark. The PCB includes 2 IC's, and arduino and an h-bridge, as well as a few headers. I need to connect the arduino to the h-bridge, and both the arduino and the h-bridge to various headers. the problem i am having is that the traces keep getting in the way of other traces. Can someone please advise me on how to lay out PCB traces for IC's? by the way, it is going to be a single layer board.
That's the main reason people use double-sided boards.
You can sometimes run traces between holes/pads, or use wire jumpers on the component side of the board to "jump-over" traces. Jumpers are quite common on single-sided boards.
Unless you are actually fabricating the board yourself (Etching the copper off somehow, drilling the holes, etc), I'd just use a 2 layer board (Same as what DVDdoug said). If you are sending it off to something like BatchPCB, Seeedstudio, or a similar service, then there is generally no reason to stick to a single layer.
It may just be that you aren't experienced enough to put things in the right place, it's also possible a that the job is not possible with a single layer board.
Either go to 2 layers or start adding jumper wires. Remember that many components like resistors and diodes etc can be used as jumpers to skip a signal over another.
