A Printed-Circuit-Board Connector Family with up to Forty-Eight Contacts per Inch of Board Height

A new family of circuit-board-to-backplane connectors has been developed for general-use packaging of electronic telecommunications equipment. They provide a range of interconnect densities between the circuit board and the backplane of from 16 to 48 connections per inch of printed-circuit-board height, up to a total of 324 connections. The family consists of four connector styles which provide two, three, four, or six columns of contacts which mate with selectively gold-plated pins inserted into a backplane on a 0.125-in grid. Each socket-type contact in the circuit-board portion provides two gold-plated contact points with a minimum end-of-life normal force of 100 g. The maximum connector insertion force is 140 g] contact. The two- and three.column connectors are attached to the printed circuit board by the heat staking of integrally molded bosses, and the terminals are connected by wave soldering. The four- and six-column connectors are riveted to their printed circuit boards and the contact tails are reflow soldered to the circuit-board conductors. A variety of environmental tests and connector characterization tests indicate that this connector family will perform reliably in telecommunications equipment.