Clearance and Creepage

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Clearance is the distance between objects from point to point, in 2-D or 3-D. The difference with a creepage check is that it considers the 3-D path across the PCB. You can think of this as the terrain. Imagine a traveller walking between two villages. If they measure the distance on their map in a straight line with a ruler, that’s the clearance distance. But if there is a valley or mountain between the two villages, the distance the traveller walks will be longer than the clearance. That distance is like the creepage distance. Creepage distance is important, because sometimes you can increase the travel distance between two objects without having to move those objects further apart.