The 10 Most Influential Connector Blogs Of 2020

I look forward to reading end-of-the-year lists that review significant events that occured in the previous year. I’m a baseball fan so there’s the list of six Baseball greats who passed away in 2020. There’s also the 20 Most Exciting Tech Products of CES 2020.

We posted about 153 connector blogs in 2020. Topics included connector design, connector and PCB processing, testing, high speed-demonstrations, new products, webinars, trends in electronics, history, BattleBots, website updates, and a few comments on current events, to name a few.

How do you go about selecting our most influential connector blogs of 2020? Readership is the most obvious criteria. But while some topics will attract more readers, they are not necessarily the most influential connector blogs of the year. If that was the case, people would say “Toy Story 3” is the best Tom Hanks movie, when we all know it’s either “Bridge of Spies,” “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” or maybe even “That Thing You Do” (OK, that last one is a long shot, but it’s a personal favorite).

So here’s Samtec’s most influential connector blogs of 2020, as selected by our editors. For simplicity’s sake, I’m listing them by date of appearance, well, except for the first one …

gEEk^® spEEk Webinars: Samtec is fortunate to have a number of SI thought leaders, like Scott McMorrow and DesignCon Engineer of the Year Istvan Novak, participating in this special webinar series. Samtec hosted 21 gEEk spEEk webinars in 2020, and the series will continue into 2021. Click here to see a list of gEEk spEEk webinars and links to all previous episodes.

Understanding IPC Class 2 vs Class 3 Solder Joints: This blog takes a quick look at IPC-A-610 Class 2 and Class 3 solder joints, and some of the requirements of those two classifications.

Si-Fly™ 112 Gbps PAM4 System & Teleportation: Samtec Si-Fly technology allows channel performance to 112 Gbps PAM4 and beyond.

Take A Little Time: Written at the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, this blog encourages us to take a little time to catch-up with some of the engineers who are doing fascinating work.

Challenges Of Aligning Multiple Connector Sets: One of the most common challenges in processing connectors to the PCB is aligning multiple connector sets between two mated PCBs.

Understanding NRZ and PAM4 Signaling: For those mechanical engineers, is there a mechanical comparison for understanding NRZ and PAM4 like there is for comparing V=IR to F=MA?

Video Games Taught Me Skills: Playing with computers from an early age gave David Pike a bedrock of confidence in the use of technology. Learn more in this fun blog.

Samtec Dives In the Deep End with PICMG: Samtec participates in a number of PICMG standards efforts. These include MicroSAM^®, MicroTCA^®, COM-HPC™ and others. This blog details latest on these emerging standards.

Flexibility That Saved America… Or, Your Power Application: Wasp’s flexibility helps save America and allows her to take down Absorbing Man, Banshee, and Equinox. While not quite at the Wasp superhero level, Samtec’s new right-angle mPOWER™ ultra micro power terminal provides even more design flexibility for power-only or power/signal applications.