Steve,

It's not just RF designers but switching power supply designers that also
would like to do away with "thermal". I was also of this mind until I had a
300 KHZ switching power supply layed out. We carefully kept the copper
paths short and wide and used NO thermals. However when the film was made
somehow all the pads were isolated from the surrounding planes and only
connected to them by two .006 inch wide thermals. To my great surprise the
design worked well within spec. We bulit 1000 of them until the next rev of
the PWB came out. I still don't like thermals and don't use them on vias
and pres-fit
connections.

Ray Klein

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