By Ed Cady
I clearly remember the day I met Jennifer Rose, one of this magazine’s first editors, who asked me to help her as an advisory editor for this new connector-oriented magazine back in 1985. I responded very positively because I was an overzealous interconnect component engineer working at Apollo Computer and I agreed that our industry needed its own monthly communication. I still have favorite copies like the August 1990 issue with a BICC-Vero backplane with five-row DIN connectors in the front-page photo. Now eight- to 18-row, value-added custom and standard connectors, performing from 5 to 12 Gbit/s per differential pair, are typically used in Serial I/O high-speed backplane applications and are headline products.
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Through the years, the magazine has had different formats, names, and owners, but still today carries out its original purposes, including cultivating and connecting our interconnect community. Ours is an industry with constant changes of technology, design, and manufacturing. Reading our industry magazine provides many benefits relative to keeping up with these changes.
Let’s look back to 1985 and the subsequent evolution of a few leading applications. Twenty years ago, the SIM memory and EISA bus connectors were the new edge-connector big deals in our industry. Now the lower circuit-count PCI-Express internal add-in boards are plugged into vertical and right-angle, high-speed, differential-paired edge connectors as well as a different version for the external cable I/O connector standard. Large 0.100-grid-pitch, 50-position external parallel SCSI I/O connectors were popular during 1985. Now, that same storage market segment is shifting in 2005, to mostly serial-attached SCSI I/O connectors including higher-density 4x connectors with eight differential pairs and thumbscrew fasteners.
 Ed Cady channeled John Lennon in 1985 (left), but now can be spotted from afar by his Hawaiian surfer shirts (right). |
How do we do business differently? Back then we used mostly “hardcopy-based” lobby visits, faxes, floppies, and snail-mail. Now we use telecommuting, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, websites, web seminars, webcasting, eMagazines, blogs, WIFI networks, and other mediums that have become part of the methods that suppliers, OEMs, ODMs, and consortiums do business.
What are some key changes regarding product development? Consider the increased interdependency of the high-speed community and electrical modeling/measurement, which is required to validate high-speed connectors, cable assemblies, and backplanes, due to expensive next-generation measurement equipment and pioneering new performance parameters, definitions, and test methodology. Customers do expect S-parameters for all high-speed components and assemblies.
I think of my previous lifetime when my office walls were stacked with dozens of pull-file cabinets and shelves full of three-ring binders, while nowadays I use some CDs but increasingly use my notebook’s HDD, DVD, or USB drive as a mobile library instead of hardcopy catalogs, papers, specs, or plastic overheads. Interconnect development used be mostly mechanically focused. Now 60% to 75% of a typical budget can be spent on electrical design and verification with 6% to 10% on environmental and 15% to 20% on mechanical verification.
Anytime, anywhere
Some current customer expectations are ones only dreamed about years ago. A user-friendly website is a key supplier capability because many engineers design anytime and anywhere.
Customers increasingly demand a high level of expertise from suppliers in signal integrity, applications, components, and design engineering. Customers now often expect multi-data-rate high-speed connectors/assemblies/solutions to last multiple generations in new product platforms. Newer solutions range from 1 to 12+Gbit/s per differential pair data rates for upgrading purposes. Some OEMs and consortiums are starting to use more “Blackbox IP” connector specifications that meet the dimensional interfacing and termination zones for recent standards.
Current industry trends include having less key info available on Website public areas due to increased global competition, though overall there is a ton of free, ever-expanding, and useful data on many corporate and organizational websites. You need a guest key to the most valuable databases. More IP is being generated for the latest generation of termination processes, as well as within the component itself. The complex switched fabric technology that is popular within systems now reflects the “human-fabric community” that was required to create it and make it successful, as no one electronic company can do it all.
ED CADY is an editorial advisor to Connector Specifier and market development director at Meritec, 15005 NW Timmerman Road, Forest Grove, OR 97116. Tel: (503) 359-4556; email: edcady@aol.com. He is an active member of the FibreChannel, Ethernet, PICMG, SFF, SID, and other industry standards committees and trade associations.
