Interconnects for the military/aerospace industry are used in a variety of applications, including communication and navigation equipment, radar, airborne, marine and space guidance control, and electronic warfare, to name a few.
While Samtec products are used in commercial applications like the industrial, datacom, telecom, computer and peripheral, instrumentation, medical, and automotive industries, aerospace and military account for a significant portion of our total sales. This is because many Samtec connector products meet the new design requirements of the mil/aero sector, including:
• Increased bandwidth
• High shock and vibration
• Ability to withstand harsh environments
• Reduced power consumption
Here’s a quick overview of Samtec connector products that are used by our military/aerospace customers:
Samtec’s Tiger Eye™ interconnect systems are designed for micro rugged, high-reliability, high-cycle applications. Tiger Eye is a multi-finger, heat-treated, Beryllium Copper (BeCu) contact designed for rugged environments. Tiger Eye is available in a variety of connector interfaces, including two-piece board-to-board, discrete wire systems, and IDC cable assemblies.
SEARAY™ is a family of high speed, high density array connectors. SEARAY is an open pin field grid array (1.27 X 1.27), which gives designers tons of design flexibility, much more than any other array product in the connector industry. SEARAY features Samtec’s patented Edge Rate™ contact system. Edge Rate is a rugged contact that is designed for high speed, high bandwidth applications. The contacts are positioned in the plastic body to minimize broadside coupling and crosstalk – one of the reasons why they’re high speed.
Micro Edge Card Connectors are not only micro pitch (down to 0.50 mm) and high speed (they’re rated from 24 Gbps to 40 Gbps), but they’re rugged. Rugged design options include weld tabs, board locks, solder locks, latching systems, justification beams which enable the use of standard tolerance PCBs, and power-signal combo connectors.
Ultra-Micro Samtec Razor Beam™ products are micro pitch, high density, high speed interconnect systems. Razor Beam products save space on the X, Y, and Z axes. In other words, they are very fine pitch, they have slim body designs, and they are low profile. Mating contacts feature undercut retention notches that produce an audible click when the contacts engage. This also increases mating and unmating forces approximately four to six times greater than typical micro pitch interconnects. Speaking of rugged, they also come with metal weld tabs to increase the mechanical strength of the part on the board.
High-Speed Cable Assemblies are available with micro coax and twinax cable, for differential and single-ended applications. Assemblies include future-proof, high-density array, integral ground plane, hermaphroditic, rugged, and high-speed PCI Express® systems. Rugged features include screw downs, panel screws, retention pins, positive latching systems, squeeze and friction latches and strain relief
Rugged Discrete Wire cable assemblies and components. These are available from 0.80 mm to 6.35 mm pitch, with wire ranges from 32 to 10 AWG. A broad selection of bodies, contacts and terminals are available with rugged latching, high-reliability Tiger Eye™ or individually shrouded contact systems, standard and high-power versions, polarization and keying. Tooling is available for component and complete assembly production.
Also, check out our Micro Rugged Application Design Guide.
