Rats nest is good enough IMO. Just saying "Pin#20 needs to be connected to Pin#88", with a visual indication that they're not connected yet, is plenty. A Rat's

Rats nest is good enough IMO. Just saying "Pin#20 needs to be connected to Pin#88", with a visual indication that they're not connected yet, is plenty. A Rat's nest is more than enough to figure out which parts need to be placed next to each other, at least for beginner boards with like ~50 or fewer components on them (and maybe ~100 or less nets/traces to manage) The issue with PCB-design is that: 1. Even the slowest ~4MHz microcontrollers have 1ns rise/fall times, or 1GHz+ of high-frequency noise all over the place. Faster chips have even faster rise/fall times. 2. ~1GHz wavelength is ~30cm, meaning that a 7.5cm trace is an effective antenna for 1GHz noise. As it turns out, 7.5cm is well within the scope of typical PCB design. A faster rise/fall time (ex: 0.2ns rise/fall time is 5GHz noise instead) could have "antennas" as small as 2.5cm or 25mm. 3. Vias have non-negligible inductance and resistance. Modern signal design also requires the designer to think of "the return path", so a 2nd nearby via to serve as a capacitively-coupled via (IE: "Route a ground-via next to any signal-via"), and other such rules, are rarely followed by autorouters. ------------ It looks like the professional tools are fixing this problem by performing FEA of signals / coupling / electronic flux, and helping the engineer visualize the magnetic and electrical fields of the designed PCB-layout. However, if you are a conservative human, you can get such a feel for your circuit by thinking about return-paths and mentally thinking about microstrips (ex: wire + ground-plane return), or striplines (ex: ground-wire-ground plane for internal layers). The return path is always on the nearby ground plane, so it makes it very easy to think about.