Should I use thermal relief on pads if destined for oven?

Community PCB Design
1

I have allot of SMDs connected to a copper power plane on a densely populated board. The thermal relief on each pad (i.e. the absent copper encircling the pad) obviously plays an important role when hand-soldering or reworking, but does this have any purpose if the board is destined for an oven?

I ask because I suspect that removing the thermal relief from pads on a densely populated PCB and having more flooded copper will be beneficial in other ways (e.g. current, EMI, etc).

2

You won’t get the correct solder profile if you don’t use thermal reliefs.

3

Good point. I didn’t think about that :oops:

I found that I only needed to reduce the thermal relief spacing to enable the copper plane to ‘flow’ as I would like.