An example of a printed circuit board is described with reference to FIGS. 3 and 4. A partial top view of backplane 160 showing a connector footprint 310 of vias for mating with the contact tails of backplane connector 150 is shown in FIG. 3. The backplane 160 may be implemented as a printed circuit board as described below. As shown, the connector footprint 310 includes an array of columns of via patterns 320. Each via pattern 320 corresponds to one differential pair of signal conductors and associated reference conductors.
Columns 322 and 324 are shown in FIG. 3. A complete connector footprint includes one column for each wafer in connector 120. Thus, the connector footprint 170 of FIG. 1 includes six columns. However, the number of columns is not limited and may correspond to the number of wafers in the mating connector. As further shown in FIG. 3, adjacent columns 322 and 324 are offset by a distance d in a direction 344 of the columns. The offset distance d may be on the order of one half the distance between the centers of signal vias 330 and 332. However, this is not a limitation.
