New Year, New Innovations & A Look Back at 2025
At Samtec, our mission is to deliver innovative interconnect solutions that meet the evolving needs of high-performance systems. To make it easier to navigate our broad portfolio, we organize our offerings into what we call solution blocks: High-Speed Board-to-Board, Optics, High-Speed Cable, RF, Rugged/Power, and Flexible Stacking. Each solution block represents a focused area of expertise, created to help engineers solve targeted and complex design challenges.
To keep pace with evolving technologies, we continue to actively expand upon each solution block. So, as 2025 is coming to an end—and before we completely shift our focus to the new year—it seems appropriate to look back on a few new product releases from this past year.
2025 New Product Highlights
Rugged/Power
The new Split Power (30 A / 30 A) option on Samtec’s PowerStrip™ EXTreme Ten60Power™ product family “splits” the 60 Amps that ET60T/ET60S is known for in half, resulting in 30 A / 30 A split separated by an insulator on a single blade. This allows increased contact count without increasing current for heat management.
ET60T/ET60S feature a modular design, which makes this mated set highly configurable for power or power/signal blind-mating applications at the backplane. You can essentially build a custom connector using the establish building block of options. Watch the video for an overview of product capabilities or visit EXTreme Ten60Power™ page.
High-Speed Board-to-Board
Need a connector supporting extremely high data throughput without taking up much space? Samtec released an 800-position high-performance array (APM6, APF6) at a 5 mm stack height that might just do the trick. APM6, APF6 AcceleRate® HP connectors support HPC, AI, storage and networking applications with 112 Gbps PAM4 performance and a flexible open pin field design. It was developed to meet the rigorous demands of today’s data-intensive systems. Data rates are compatible with PCIe® 6.0, CXL® 3.2 and 100 GbE protocols.
High-Speed Cable
Speaking of AcceleRate® HP, Samtec also has a cable-to-board version using our proprietary Eye Speed® ultra-low-skew Flyover® cable technology for routing a high number of transmission lines from the chip and off the board without signal degradation or delay. The AcceleRate® HP cable system is commonly used in high-performance, high-density supercomputer architectures and is also PCIe® 6.0/CXL® 3.2 capable. An 8-row version (ARP6/APF6-S) released just a few days ago, with panel mount and low-profile mid-board options coming in the very near future.
Si-Fly® LP is another great product using Samtec’s ultra-low-skew Eye Speed® twinax. Its primary benefit is that it’s extremely low-profile for accommodating a limited z-axis height, allowing it to reside under IC cooling hardware near the IC package. A 16-pair design is available with up to 1.79 Tbps of aggregate data rate. The 8-pair design features a 3.06 mm ultra-low mated height: that’s about the same height as two stacked US pennies!
Edge Cards
Edge cards, also known as card edge connectors, are a subset of our High-Speed Board-to-Board solution block but there isn’t a mated set. Rather, a printed circuit board plugs directly into the edge card socket. These types of interconnects are commonly used for connecting peripherals to a motherboard and enable high data transfer rates. HSEC6-RA is Samtec’s newest right-angle edge card with a small 0.60 mm pitch and 64 Gbps PAM4 performance. It is also SFF-TA-1002 compliant (x4 (1C), x8 (2c), x16 (4C & 4C+) making it ideal for servers and data centers.
RF / Precision RF
Push-on interconnects are in ever-increasing demand in military, aerospace and communication applications. As a result, Samtec expanded its SMPM and SMP offering to include rugged retention features and enhanced product designs with improved performance. SMPMT Series are threaded board mount SMPM connectors with a MIL-STD-348 interface and DC to 60 GHz performance. Screw downs have also been added to our ganged, Magnum RF® SMPM solutions supporting rugged, high shock and vibe environments. Also, an enhanced design SMP connector allowing true DC to 40 GHz performance was created in support of Ka-band military applications.
Now, let’s talk about flexure and the need for stability in high-performance microwave cables. Flexure (bending or twisting) changes a cable’s internal geometry and shifts the electrical path. These shifts can lead to measurement errors in test and measurement or cause instability of beam steering in radar or satellite systems. Also, mechanical stress when bending or twisting can change the dielectric’s properties and alter performance. These effects can be more pronounced at higher frequencies. Therefore, using a cable specifically designed for stability at high frequencies is extremely important. Samtec’s Nitrowave™ cable assemblies feature excellent phase and amplitude stability with flexure due to the optimized construction. The inclusion of a Dynamic Performance Layer (DPL) provides consistent electrical performance throughout the cable’s life span even when subjected to constant use and movement in any direction. Assemblies are available with a wide range of connector end options, with target frequencies of 32 GHz, 43.5 GHz, 71 GHz, 95 GHz and 110 GHz. During product development, frequency capability was purposefully designed to go beyond traditional industry targets in support of advancing applications and spectrum allocation.
Samtec’s Innovative Interconnect Solutions
Thanks for taking a moment to walk through a few of our new product highlights from 2025. As we continue to innovative in 2026, be on the lookout for more new products from Samtec. Ground breaking technologies are already well on their way supporting 448 Gbps, Co-Packaged CPX connectivity, Glass Core Technology, and many more. 2026 looks to be quite an exciting year.
In the meantime, if there are questions regarding existing Samtec products or questions regarding the products discussed above, please reach out to our Application Support Group at [email protected].
