Oh hell no.

I think a lot of people are overly cautious of DC-DC conversion in this topic, but you've gone full-tilt in the opposite direction and are severely underestimating the problems that occur.

1. Its not "power-conversion" that's hard per se, its EMC that's very hard and not taught very well at a bachelor's level.

2. DC-DC Voltage Converters usually handle the entirety of your board's power, meaning they are the highest power component.

3. High power and high-frequency is a difficult EMC problem. This means that a bad design will absolutely send your electrons / energy out and radiate out like an antenna. And if things on the same board pick it up, it will be called crosstalk. And if things off-board pick it up, its called electromagnetic interference which almost certainly leads to a compliance problem.

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1. Hobbyists don't care about compliance. So bam. We are already dealing with the biggest problem by simply not caring about it. (Maybe you can care and go into deeper studies, but... if you're a beginner just don't care. Learn this very difficult stuff later).

2. Prevent crosstalk by following good board design rules: have a 4-layer board. Use Power+Signal / GND / GND / Power+Signal stackup. Use two vias (one for signal-1 to signal-4 traversals), and a 2nd via for GND2 to GND3 traversal of the return current). Thinking of both the forward current and a tightly bound reverse current is basically all you need to do to avoid difficult crosstalk problems on board.

Done.

Point#2 requires deeper studies than is typical in bachelor's level electrical engineering. But it truly isn't very difficult once you learn the theory. Tight ground-planes reduce crosstalk (and EMI problems), and furthermore thinking of the return-current explicitly prevents problems.

Now you could have some truly difficult "ringing" from trace inductance and other such nasty problems... but that tends to occur beyond 100MHz. I'm thinking most beginners are going to be under 20MHz for most of their designs and thus never deal with those advanced "PDN" / Power Delivery Network problems.

Though if you do go into PDNs, its obviously a tough subject with huge amounts of study and reading involved. But most of the problems truly are at very high frequencies and/or at EMI compliance. Beginner Hobbyists avoid the most difficult issues entirely by nature of beginner (aka: low-speed) and hobbyist (and therefore don't have to follow regulators).

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I'm not a professional. But my understanding is that top-level EEs who work on PDNs will simulate the circuit-board itself to figure out trace inductances / capacitances in the board itself. (Closer planes of ground/power will create more capacitance. Long traces tend to increase trace inductance, etc. etc.). And tight simulations are the only way to truly understand the PCB and how it interacts at high frequencies with high-power.

But such methodologies are gross overkill for a 1MHz boost converter with a pre-made PCB Layout, and a list of capacitors + inductors already picked out for you. (ex: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/mcp1640)

Seriously: Page 17 (https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/aemDocuments/documents/A...) already gives you the PCB-layout you need for this, with recommended components. Don't overthink it, just copy the design from the document.