Has this ever happened to you? The board is finished. The traces are tightly routed and you have done a magnificent job of confining them to the fewest possible number of signal trace layers. Then the engineer calls and tells you he has forgotten one little thing--just one little net that happens to run horizontally across the entire board! It will take hours to tweak hundreds of other traces to fit this one in. But, just one little slot in an adjacent ground plane would make room for it and you would be done in minutes. And, after all, it is the engineer's fault, not yours, that you have to create this little slot! Tempting, isn't it? Well, don't do it! This article will give you three reasons why slots in planes are to be avoided on high speed boards.