in cases where the removal of plated through holes beneath surface pads of power ground lines results in power ground connections not be provided to areas of the circuit board where they are needed additional power ground lines may be required on a top or bottom surface of the circuit board therefore the power ground design engine 730 may evaluate the design layout to determine if all areas of the circuit board are provided with sufficient power ground connections if not then a surface pad only power ground line may be connected to a nearby power ground line whose plated through hole has not been removed by way of an additional power ground line on the surface of the circuit board as a result additional area is made available in lower layers of the circuit board for additional signal wire routings beneath the power ground surface pads without eliminating required power ground connections the signal wire optimization engine 740 takes advantage of this additional area to redesign the signal wire routings to optimize the signal wire routing based on the additional area that is made available the resulting optimized signal wire routings may be fed back into the circuit board design engine 710 to further modify the circuit board design to take full advantage of the additional signal wire routings the resulting optimized circuit board design is then provided to the circuit board fabrication engine 750 which is used along with circuit board fabrication machinery to fabricate the circuit board in accordance with the optimized circuit board design fig8 is a flowchart outlining an exemplary operation of the present invention it will be understood that each.