CASE STUDIES — PCIe Board Side Connectors

Our customer is one of the top 3 interconnect companies in the world. Their products typically employ leading edge technology and the company introduces products on extremely aggressive schedules. Their core competency in interconnect development is unsurpassed. However, their ability to bring this project in on time was hindered by a lack of available internal resources.

IST was able to fill that void. We were contracted to develop the lowest cost connector to meet the signal transmissions requirements of the External PCI Express Specification for both Gen 1 (2.5Gb/s) and Gen 2 (6.25 Gb/s) data rates.

Because of our intimate knowledge and expertise of the electronic interconnects industry, we were able to develop a PCIe connector platform that leveraged the industry standard 0.8mm pluggable interface which currently spans multiple protocols with multiple suppliers of SFP, XFP, XPAK, Xenpak and X2 connectors used in: T11.2 Fibre Channel: ≤10 Gb/s; InfiniBand™ Trade Association: 2.5Gb/s; IEEE 802.3 Ethernet: ≤10.0 Gb/s; SFF Committee: SFP, XFP, and XPAK. Working as an extension of our client's engineering department, we developed a complete"“PCIe Pluggable" product family which meets the External PCIe requirements for 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x configurations on 0.8.. Pitch. The following design objectives were successfully achieved:

  • 10Gb/s data rate exceeds current PCIe Gen 1 and Gen 2 requirements
  • Keying options available for Gen 1 and Gen2
  • PCI and PCIe standard height & low profile adapter cards
  • Applications: PMC/VMC mezzanine cards and  cPCI/VME carrier cards
  • Half height & Full Height AMC mezzanine cars and ATCA carrier cards
  • RoHS Compliant


Technical Skills

  • Intimate knowledge of industry, equipment, and application engineering
  • Transmission Line and Signal Fidelity Theory
  • Electronic Contact Physics
  • Electro-mechanical engineering principles
  • Copper Alloy materials selection
  • Polyester Thermoplastic materials selection
  • Injection Molding manufacturing processes
  • Materials Treatments and Finishes

ist gets it done!