I wanted to play with the TB6600 so got some chip's.
I don't like the Chinese designs as some of you will know: Bending and stressing the pins, poor quality electrolytic capacitor,...

First attempt was a traditional design, see pic below. Advantage over the Chinese is easier and better PCB layout, Problem is size and difficult heatsink mounting for some people.

So I pondered and thought on a possible better and smaller "flat" design.
It took a while to find it and came up with this solution: Cut part of the upper pins so that they can be used as throughole, the lower pins are "SMD style" soldered to the solderside of the PCB. This doesn't stress the pins and there's no slot in the PCB, due to the lack of the slot: routing is easier and a much better design is possible: larger tracks and power planes.
Result is a very small (2x2 inch) drive.

Difficult to explain, see attached pictures for details.