  We designed and operated a surface ion trap, with an ion-substrate distance
of 500\mum, realized with standard printed-circuit-board techniques. The trap
has been loaded with up to a few thousand Sr+ ions in the Coulomb-crystal
regime. An analytical model of the pseudo-potential allowed us to determine the
parameters that drive the trap into anisotropic regimes in which we obtain
large (N>150) purely 2D ion Coulomb crystals. These crystals may open a simple
and reliable way to experiments on quantum simulations of large 2D systems.
