Posted to News on 13th Apr 2008, 19:41
Filter connector resists thermal shock and vibration
ITT Interconnect Solutions - Cannon, Veam & BIW, has invested significantly, ramping up its production capacity in response to market demands for its new Chip on Flex (CoF) filter technology that is said to virtually eliminate all stress from thermal shock and vibration while providing superior protection to sensitive electronics in a lighter package. In MIL-DTL-38999 configurations, the CoF connectors have passed MIL-DTL-38999 Series III testing for thermal shock, random vibration, humidity and high altitude. The filter connectors are suitable for high-reliability industrial, military and aerospace applications including integrated avionics, radio and navigation systems, fire control devices, electronic counter measures, satellite communications and data transmitters.
Cannon's CoF design replaces the traditional internal ceramic planar array block capacitors with a state-of-the-art flexible circuit on which individual chip capacitors are surface-mounted on a pad adjacent to the feed-through contact. Since the feed-through contacts are not soldered directly to the capacitor, thermal stress points - that would otherwise impact performance in thermal shock and vibration - are virtually eliminated.
The result is a very robust filter connector with superior mechanical performance and improved reliability. In addition, because the flex is significantly lighter, a connector weight reduction of up to 15 per cent is achieved for the MIL-DTL-38999 configurations.
CoF filter connectors provide all the standard filtering capabilities, such as individual isolated pin filtering of high-frequency noise, built-in ground plane barriers in the connector inserts, and filtering at the face of system boxes. The approach offers the system designer complete flexibility in defining or changing individual circuit capacitance, ground and EMP performance during the design/development phase - thereby eliminating any need to retool the ceramic planar array.
The Cannon CoF design utilises readily available flex circuits and active components leading to reduced design/development cycle times, overall hardware delivery lead times and cost.
