BY PAT WASTAL
For semiconductor and silicon vendors, staying current on connector technology many seem like an inconsequential distraction from their core businesses. Yet to market their products effectively, they will need evaluation hardware.
Connector technology is one key to obtaining top performance. Working with the right partner can help vendors obtain the right connections with minimal hassle.
There is an old saying that if you build a better mousetrap, customers will come flocking to your door. In today’s semiconductor and silicon markets, however, customers are demanding more than a good product. They want significant design support.
One approach that high-end companies are using to meet this demand is to provide full reference designs and evaluation boards that showcase their chips and cores. Customers use these collateral products to evaluate the components and, in many cases, as the basis of their own product designs. Sometimes, they simply repackage the reference design, add their own software, and sell the result.
These reference designs and evaluation boards are key sales tools for chip and core companies. If the designs perform well, they boost sales. If the performance is sub-optimal, however, they can drive business elsewhere.
 Evaluation boards, such as this one, are key sales tools for chip and core vendors, and connector choices can have an impact on board performance. |
Connectors are an often-overlooked component in board design, yet they can have a significant performance impact. In today’s world of high-speed, low-voltage signals, a connector’s impedance, matching, isolation, and electromagnetic noise characteristics have major effects on the speed and range of the signals it carries. Impedance mismatches between connector pins can skew signals and cause clocking failures. Coupling within the connector can add noise that creates bit errors. Insufficient isolation can leave expensive board components vulnerable to damaging static and other high voltages.
Choosing a connector can be a complex task. In addition to electrical performance, factors to consider include the connector size, mating type, and mounting technique. The connector’s ability to handle diverse environments, the manufacturing processes needed for board fabrication, and the connector’s adherence to relevant standards must also be considered. Finally, cost and availability are key elements in many designs, because choices in reference design will affect later customer experiences when they enter volume production.
With so many connector vendors offering a bewildering array of product choices, choosing the best connectors for a given design requires an in-depth understanding of the options. Some of this expertise may be available directly from connector manufacturers, but that expertise is typically limited to their own product lines and is seldom unbiased. As a result, chip and core vendors must have relationships with many connector vendors or their own sources of expertise to ensure that their reference designs and evaluation boards use connectors that let their products show at their best.
Unfortunately, since chip and core designers need to concentrate on their core competence, many do not have the resources to develop connector expertise. Relationships may also be hard to develop. Because chip and core companies typically do not manufacture boards in high volumes, connector vendors may not be willing to offer extensive design support.
To solve these challenges, chip and core design companies can work with partners that have extensive product-selection expertise as well as significant buying power. A distributor, for example, has buying power that can command significant support from a broad selection of connector manufacturers. This, in turn, allows the distributor to develop in-depth knowledge of the broad connector market and assist their partners in making the best connector choice.
Working with a distributor partner can start as early in the design as the block-diagram stage. Distributors typically offer design services for the creation of evaluation boards, so they have the expertise in-house to work with the customer design team to develop detailed specifications. These design service teams work on a wide variety of projects, so they have the additional benefit of exposure to many design alternatives.
One of the key benefits from working with distributors is that they take into account the technical constraints of the design when recommending connector parts. As with other industries, manufacturers might offer products that meet size and configuration requirements of a design, but distributors can help you determine which best-in-class products are the ones for your design. Distributors can help design teams select the right connector type as well as the right manufacturer for that individual connector.
The distributor partnership offers an additional, indirect benefit to chip and core developers: Developers can assure their customers that the components in the reference design are available for volume production. This assurance helps the company develop a reputation for top-level support of its products and customers, which will help with the next design win.
Connector technology, often overlooked by semiconductor and silicon IP vendors, represents a key opportunity for enhancing the sales of chips and cores. Capitalizing on this opportunity, however, requires knowledge and relationships that vendors may not be able to develop on their own. A partnership with an experienced, broad-based distributor can fill the void, helping vendors to showcase their products and support their customers.
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PAT WASTAL is senior vice president of Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas’ IP&E unit (www.em.avnet.com).
